eJournals

Introduction: Transnational Hi/ Stories - Turkish-German Texts and Contexts Ela GEzEn/ BErna GuEnElI amherst, Ma / Grinnell, Ia The field of Turkish-German Studies has grown significantly in recent years. Scholars working in a variety of disciplines have influenced and invigorated the field: leslie adelson, Daniela Berghahn, Tom Cheesman, rita Chin, Deniz Göktürk, randall Halle, Kader Konuk, ruth Mandel, B. Venkat Mani, azade Seyhan, Karin Yeșilada, and Yasemin Yildiz, to name a few. 1 The central concerns of contemporary Turkish-German Studies have revolved around intersections of nation, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. Yet while much important work has been conducted to investigate «the cultural effects of migration» and to examine «reconfigurations of the German national archive,» with this special issue we would like to shift the focus in our field to also examine the implications for the Turkish archive (adelson 7, 12). at the same time, we conceive of this special issue as a forum for examining the significance of Turkish contexts - cultural, political, historical, and social - in regard to our research questions, and for identifying existing blind spots and possible directions for the future. In the past two decades critics have productively explored the significance of the Turkish-German subject within German public political and memory discourse, focusing on representations of the Holocaust, the Cold War, 1968, and reunification. More recent publications, however, have pursued new investigative directions by expanding both the traditional geographical focus and temporal scope of earlier studies: Kader Konuk’s exploration of the impact of German-Jewish exiles on modern Turkey; randall Halle’s work on film production guidelines and practices in a Turkish and European context; Yasemin Yildiz’s in-depth engagement with the Turkish historical context during the 1960s and 1970s in her analysis of translational practices; as well as Deniz Göktürk’s work in-film studies with her emphases on institutional frameworks, tactical role-pay and humor, and digital spectatorship. 2 Two publications in particular promote, address, and circulate interdisciplinary conversation, exchange, and research within Turkish-German Studies. First, Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel’s edited volume Turkish German Cinema: Sites, Sounds, and Screens in the New Millennium (2012), which grew out of a CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 377 11.11.14 17: 50 378 Ela Gezen/ Berna Gueneli workshop on Turkish-German cinema held at the university of Texas at austin in 2010. Comprised of fifteen essays that foreground transnational Turkish-German visual culture and discuss topics such as institutional practices, sound, installation art and television, and actors, this book indeed presents a novelty by «offer[ing] an overview of contemporary practices and debates associated with Turkish German cinema, […] outlin[ing] the shifts in aesthetic and critical sensibilities since the 1970s, and […] introduc[ing] intertextual, contextual, institutional and transnational perspectives» (15). The second publication, equally unique in its focus on (multi-author) Turkish-German Studies scholarship, is the transnational yearbook Türkisch-deutsche Studien edited by Şeyda Ozil (Istanbul university), Michael Hofmann (university of Paderborn), and Yasemin Dayioğlu-Yücel (university of Pennsylvania). Published annually since 2010 it provides a platform for interdisciplinary networking in order to «neue Synergien zu entdecken und Synthesen zu wagen und somit die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit türkisch-deutschen Themen anzuregen» (Ozil et al.). Inspired by these groundbreaking publications in the field of Turkish-German Studies - publications that provide a platform for interdisciplinary, transatlantic scholarly exchange and dialogue - we see this special issue as the most recent manifestation of these collaborative efforts. In line with current scholarship, we hope that this issue will offer new insights into the most recent Turkish-German entanglements, encounters, and exchanges by expanding geographical, temporal, and methodological frameworks that have thus far eluded German Studies. The special issue resulted from a series of panels titled «Transnational Hi/ Stories: Turkish-German Texts and Contexts» and presented at the 2013 conference of the German Studies association in Denver, Colorado. The decision to put together this panel series arose from an unexpectedly high number of submissions that offered new approaches, methodological frameworks, comparative analyses, and considerations of underexamined historical and cultural contexts and archives. In various conversations during the conference, panel participants and attendees alike expressed and emphasized the need for a forum to engage in conversations about current scholarship, possible (interdisciplinary and transatlantic) collaborations, and future projects. We perceive of this special issue as the first result of these conversations and as a timely response to the need for a platform of scholarly exchange, debate, and discussion regarding the past, present, and future of Turkish-German Studies, and its objects of inquiry. The introduction to this volume stands in a dialogical relationship with the first essay by David Gramling. Both pieces taken together are intended to provide a stimulus for future conversation, for which a look at past and pres- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 378 11.11.14 17: 50 Introduction 379 ent scholarly practices is essential. Gramling thus explores a cross section of recent debates and discourses within Turkish-German Studies on both sides of the atlantic. at the same time he examines Turkish (and Ottoman) literary, historical, and linguistic texts which resist classification into a single national archive, foregrounding their significance for Turkish, German, and Turkish- German Studies. While zafer Şenocak’s œuvre overall has received much scholarly attention, Elke Segelcke directs her inquiry at his less-considered novel Deutsche Schule (2012), first published in Turkish in 2007. Through a historically contextualized close reading Segelcke offers new insights into Şenocak’s representation of links between German and Turkish histories. With Maha El-Hissy’s contribution on Yade Kara’s Cafe Cyprus (2008) we encounter a new contextual framework: the Cyprus question, as it is woven into «Kaffeehauskultur,» which evokes longstanding coffee house traditions in both East and West. Mert Bahadir reisoğlu investigates overlaps and differences in literary debates surrounding 1968 in both Turkish and German contexts, and their significance for Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998). His reading highlights the interaction of both archives in Özdamar’s text and their transformation in the process. While music - with the exception of rap and, more recently, soundtracks - has received little attention as object of inquiry in Turkish-German Studies, Ela Gezen shifts our attention to the Turkish music collective Bandista by examining their appropriation of various traditions of Marxist protest from the German context. The final piece by Berna Gueneli investigates the creation of a transnational film history within the work of Fatih akın. Taking The Edge of Heaven (2007) as a case study, Gueneli discusses the casting choices and the soundtrack to highlight the cinematic intertextualities (Yeşilçam, Young Turkish and new Turkish Cinema) that ground akın’s work. Our vision for the future of Turkish-German Studies is based on other collaborative models in the field of German Studies such as Film Studies and Black German Studies. Since 2001, scholars of DEFa film have been convening biannually for the East German Film Summer Institute at the university of Massachusetts at amherst, organized by the DEFa film library and consisting of workshops, screenings, and readings. Similarly, the university of Michigan has been hosting the biannual German Film Institute since 2004, featuring screenings and a weeklong seminar on a given topic. Finally, the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHra) has hosted its annual convention since 2009 showcasing scholarly, artistic, CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 379 11.11.14 17: 50 380 Ela Gezen/ Berna Gueneli and autobiographical presentations. While Turkish-German scholarship is regularly represented at various international, national, and regional conferences, workshops, and symposia, 3 we hope that based on current conversations, recent developments, and upcoming collaborations - including this special issue - we will be able to lay the foundation for a multi-media and multi-format platform similar to those mentioned above; a venue that will further motivate and facilitate interdisciplinary and transnational exchange and collaboration between scholars working on Turkish-German texts and contexts. Notes as guest editors of this special issue we would like to thank all contributors for their engaging essays,-as well as the co-editors of Colloquia Germanica, Harald Höbusch and linda Worley, for their interest in and commitment to providing a forum for publication. 1 See for example, adelson (2005), Berghahn (2010; 2013), Cheesman (2007), Chin (2007), Halle (2008; 2014) Mandel (2008), Mani (2007), Seyhan (2001), and Yeşilada (2012). 2 See for example, Yildiz (2008; 2012), Konuk (2012), Halle (2008; 2014), and Göktürk (2000; 2004; 2012). 3 a few examples include: the conference Goodbye Germany? Migration, Culture and the Nation State at the university of California, Berkeley (2004), the conference Interzone EU: Crossroads of Migration at the university of Pittsburgh (2008), the symposium Evenementalisierung von Kultur: Fatih Akıns Film auf der anderen Seite als transkulturelle Narration at the university of Konstanz (2008), the Graduiertenkolloquium Interkulturelle Konstellationen im deutsch-türkischen Kontext at the university of Paderborn (2009), the conference Türkisch-Deutscher Kulturkontakt und Kulturtransfer: Kontroversen und Lernprozesse at Istanbul university (2010), the workshop Rethinking German-Turkish Cinema at the university of Texas at austin (2010), the Transnational German Studies Workshop at the university of Michigan, university of Warwick, and Humboldt university (2012 and 2013), the conference Mobilizing Difference: Gender, Islam, and the Production of Contemporary Europeanness at the university of Illinois at urbana-Champaign (2013), the German Literature Transnational conference at nYu (2014), the symposium Transnational Encounters and Interdisciplinary Dialogues at the university of Massachusetts at amherst (2014), and the Intersections: Cross-Cultural Theater in Germany and the US conference at the university of Pennsylvania (2014). Works Cited adelson, leslie. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar. new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Berghahn, Daniela. Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh uP, 2013. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 380 11.11.14 17: 50 Introduction 381 Berghahn, Daniela, and Claudia Sternberg, eds. European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe. new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Cheesman, Tom. Novels of Turkish German Settlement. Cosmopolite Fictions. rochester, nY: Camden House, 2007. Chin, rita. The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge uP, 2007. Göktürk, Deniz. «Turkish Delight - German Fright. unsettling Oppositions in Transnational Cinema.» eipcp.net. EIPCP: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2000. Web. 12 May 2014. -. «Strangers in Disguise: role-Play beyond Identity Politics in anarchic Film Comedy.» Multicultural Germany: Art, Performance and Media. Special Issue of New German Critique 92 (2004): 100-22. -. «Mobilität und Stillstand im Weltkino digital.» Kultur als Ereignis: Fatih Akıns Film «Auf der anderen Seite» als transkulturelle Narration. Ed. Özkan Ezli. Bielefeld: Transcript: 2010. 15-45. Hake, Sabine, and Barbara Mennel, eds. Turkish German Cinema: Sites, Sounds, and Screens in the New Millennium. Oxford: Berghahn, 2012. Halle, randall. «Experiments in Turkish-German Film-making: ayse Polat, neco Celik, aysun Bademsoy and Kanak attak.» New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 7.1 (2009): 39-53. -. The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities. urbana: u of Illinois P, 2014. -. German Film After Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic. urbana: u of Illinois P, 2008. Konuk, Kader. East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey. Stanford: Stanford uP, 2010. Mandel, ruth. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Durham: Duke uP, 2008. Mani, B. Venkat. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. Iowa City: u of Iowa P, 2007. Ozil, Şeyda, et al. «Türkisch-deutsche Studien Jahrbuch.» v-r.de. Vandenhoeck & ruprecht, 2010. Web. 28 april 2014. Seyhan, azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton uP, 2001. Yeşilada, Karin. Poesie der dritten Sprache: Türkisch-deutsche Lyrik der zweiten Generation. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2012. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. new York: Fordham uP, 2012. -. «Political Trauma and literal Translation: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge.» Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch-7 (2008): 248-70. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 381 11.11.14 17: 50 What is Turkish-German Studies up against? Occidentalism and Thigmotactics DaVID GraMlInG university of arizona Disciplinary boundaries allow counterevidence to belong to someone else’s story. (Susan Buck-Morss, «Hegel and Haiti» 822) recently, the editors of Türkisch-Deutsche Studien made the quizzically delightful decision to title their 2012 yearbook - the volume immediately after the semi-centennial of the 1961 guest-worker accord - Fifty-One Years of Turkish Guest-Worker Migration in Germany. With this title, they offered up a gentle satire of ‹the anniversary› as a collective stock-taking jubilee. But the title also seemed to be suggesting other implications: perhaps that Turkish-German Studies is itself a living, aging endeavor with an idiosyncratic, uneven, and centrifugal temporality. Perhaps further, it reminded us that the future of this field will be negotiated by an always finite and evolving constellation of scholarly personnel, working around the world in specific and complex institutional contexts. Self-evident as these facts may be, they are just as formative, load-bearing, and yet easily missed in the scheme of things as an off-year anniversary. at the 2013 German Studies association convention in Denver, Colorado, for instance - 52 years after the first West German labor agreement with Turkey - the scholarly personnel of Turkish-German studies was comprised of just 19 presenters, from among 900 total talks given at the convention. The majority of these scholars who were working actively on Turkish-German topics were dissertators, post-doctoral fellows, or visiting and adjunct faculty, with a few assistant and associate professors among them. There was thus little continuity with the field’s scholarly leaders from previous decades, though that continuity was interestingly supplemented by the fact that around half of the presenters focused on the most canonical voices of Turkish-German cultural production over the past twenty years: namely zafer Şenocak, Feridun zaimoglu, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Fatih akın, though they did so in new and innovative ways. The remaining half of the presentations followed the «Turkish turn» (adelson, The Turkish Turn) in a very different direction, critiquing the transfer, exportation, and hybridization of political theory, CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 382 11.11.14 17: 50 What is Turkish-German Studies up against? 383 statecraft models, and institutional management between Turkey and Germany from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. This productive divergence in focus and method - with all of its institutional, methodological, and epistemic implications - seems to merit a moment of lateral reflection. One temporal arc that might help contextualize our research situation in 2014 is the full quarter-century that has now elapsed since Turkish-German inquiry hit the american German Studies scene in a formal way. Back in 1989, the entire practical and symbolic domain of Turkishness in Germany presented frontal counterevidence for even the most heterodox methodologies and quotidian procedures of academic Germanistik. In her introduction to the first special issue devoted to Germany’s minority cultures in 1989 - of which there would be many more - azade Seyhan described a calcifying epistemic isolation in Germanistik, in the face of the Federal republic’s vastly diversified social, ethnic, and linguistic landscape. In a corrective spirit, she suggested that Turkish-German inquiry and other «minority discourses in our discipline can lead to increased self-reflexive praxis and critiques of systematic constructions of others» («Introduction» 4). This vision was thus one of ‹benefits and enrichments to the discipline,› by way of necessary and as-yetunspecifiable recalibrations of method. arlene Teraoka had also laid groundwork for this transatlantic intervention in her own 1987 piece in Cultural Critique on «guest-worker literature.» In that 1989 introduction to New German Critique, Seyhan cited aras Ören, the Turkish-writing, Turkish-German poet and novelist, who asked (in translation): Dies durchsichtige Schweigen Ist das Weh der Stille am ausgang fast des Jahrhunderts sind noch ungesprochene Worte? (3) For transnational writers like Ören, and for Germanists like Seyhan - both variously coming to terms with the epistemic pressure of a nearing century’s end - silence(s) of a particular discursive shape in German thought were both transparent and painful, perhaps more painful because transparent. accordingly, writers and researchers were eager at that moment to open new lines of thought and imagination, to capacitate methods for critique and figuration yet to be uttered - amid the baffles of disciplinary and ethnonational reproduction. Given this awareness of the as-yet-unuttered in 1989, Ören was indeed a fascinating pick with whom to enframe an initial Turkish-German intervention into uS German Studies as a discipline. Ören was, after all, a fountain of nothing but counterevidence for what Turkish-German studies was about CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 383 11.11.14 17: 50 384 David Gramling to become at the beginning of the 1990s: a field that would voluntarily focus on Turkish-German writers, filmmakers, former guest workers and former immigrants explicitly addressing German societal and discursive norms and doing so in the German language. During the pre-unification Kohl years, the Chamisso Prize and the offices of the federal Ausländerbeauftragte had seen to it that literary-cultural production in German was to be the gold standard and official focus of attention for Turkish-German relations. This was the case, despite the fact that Ören, the first recipient of the Chamisso Prize in 1985, had been arguably less interested in critiquing Germany as a cultural entity than in transfiguring Europe as a civic one - and doing so while writing primarily in Turkish for an internationalist audience. 1 In the late 1980s, amid what was by most accounts a progressive, post-ethnic reframing of cultural production around the ‹common language› of German, interventions in Turkish - and (more importantly) the types of discursive interventions that typically happened in Turkish or in Turkish literary lineages - were increasingly made opaque to this cause. Their relevance for an emerging inquiry into Turkish-German questions became diffuse, their potential addressivity to the European reading public seemed askew, and their performative claims seemed often unmoored among the painful, transparent gaps between national imaginaries. Deniz Göktürk recounts her own experiences translating avant-garde Turkish literature into German in the early 1990s, particularly the postmodernist Bilge Karasu’s collection The Garden of Departed Cats (Göçmüş kediler bahçesi, 1979): «Established publishers in Germany did not want to take on my translation of Garden, claiming that there was no readership for it, that Turkish authors were writing as if they still lived in the nineteenth century. Such efforts to introduce to Europe writers who imagine the essence of Europe regularly ended in impasse, as we grappled with the challenge of presenting a new image of Turkey via literature and other arts» (131). Göktürk recalls watching, together with Karasu, the television broadcast of Özdamar’s trailblazing 1991 win of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for literature, and wondering aloud with him about the implications of this win for Turkish lines of thought on German territory in the coming decades. Though Karasu had himself been deeply invested in Eastern-Western and Turkish-German reconfigurations, his texts went either unpublished or uncommented in Germany over the course of the 1990s, in part because he didn’t ring in legibly on German-domestic questions of intercultural dialogue. For his part, Ören’s work had also (almost) always been written in Turkish, though it most often debuted first in German and received next to no readerly acclaim or intellectual attention in Turkey. Ören has thus always CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 384 11.11.14 17: 50 What is Turkish-German Studies up against? 385 already been presumed to belong to someone else’s philology - both in Germany and in Turkey. In a sense, there is good reason for this persistent philological discomfiture toward Ören and his generation in Germany and Turkey alike, beyond the fact that he wrote in the symbolically wayward Turkish-German language of Turkish. Particularly Ören’s early work from the 1970s was rather circumspect about the national or the cultural as an integer of inquiry at all - whether Turkish, German, or otherwise (see Gramling, «The Caravanserai» 60-65). The sphere of influence for his poetics in the 1970s and into the 1980s had been socialist-migrational labor internationalism: that is, local organizing in working-class neighborhoods peopled by guest workers and working-class unionists who often happened to be ethnic Germans with their own history of displacement in the midst and aftermath of nazism. Their location on German territory was not his, nor their, only primary concern. as with Ören’s contemporary Güney Dal, the integrationist imperatives of the Kohl years were only one among a diverse spectrum of figural investments. Dal and Ören’s readability thus became more and more recalcitrant as the symbolic landscape of the 1990s compressed Turkish-German discourse into various prerequisite oppositions: integrationist politics vs. transnational aesthetics, patriarchal Islam vs. Schwarzerian liberal secularism, miserable parallels vs. pleasurable hybridities, etc. The result was that Dal, Ören, and Karasu’s work (and that of the others I will discuss below) still now frequently lingers at and beyond the methodological frontiers of Turkish-German studies. They offer today what I consider to be a thigmotactic index for Turkish-German inquiry - pointing out to us the limits of what we are willing to consider relevant on a field of critical play that is itself fundamentally predicated on the crossing of borders. Their work presciently seeks out and tracks the self-limiting negotiations of our field (in a Bourdieusian sense), skirting and tracing the proportions of recognizable relevance. Their writings do so not through a preconceived strategy of resistance or reinscription, but organically: as fruits of a transnational literary vision that could always only muster a secondary interest in the ideal of claiming Germanness - an important historical ideal indeed, as these authors acknowledge, but only one among many aesthetic, cosmopolitan, and social visions. Ören’s words - cited by Seyhan, and translated into German for an american German Studies journal twenty-five years ago - are an enduring emblem for the predicament of Turkish-German Studies in 2014. They trace not only a «history of contact» (adelson, «Touching Tales») or a «negative hermeneutics» (Şenocak) of Turkish Germany, but indeed pursue those non-places of discourse whose relevance to national philology is opaque and unprogram- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 385 11.11.14 17: 50 386 David Gramling matic, spaces where no charismatic moment of ‹cultural› contact is even positable. Ören’s translated questions from the Turkish - about transparent silences, and about words that are still yet to be uttered - are thus incumbent upon the ensuing second quarter-century of our research field as well. 2 Since the 1980s, the scholarly enterprise of Turkish-German Studies has tended to nourish some typical rhetorical forms and concerns: interaction, interculturality, dialogue, understanding, contact, misunderstanding, aesthetic sovereignty, mutual discovery, hybridity, and «dismantling stereotypes» - though differently so in German intercultural Germanistik than in uS German Studies. Scholars have worked through and around these metanarratives on both sides of the atlantic by means of divergent methodologies shaping how the field recognizes evidence, counterevidence, relevance, and obliqueness vis-a-vis those metanarratives. Consider for example Michael Hofmann and Inge Pohlmeier’s 2013 delineation of Turkish-German literature, as «literature in the German language whose intercultural constellations are primarily and decidedly geared toward the overcoming of cliché images of Germanness or of Turkishness. The history of German-Turkish literature begins with the labor agreement [of 1961]» (8, translation mine). Hofmann narrows the aperture further in his 2013 authoritative monograph, Deutsch-türkische Literaturwissenschaft, as follows: «For an ambitious reading public and for literary studies, Islamically oriented authors who wish to undo the Europeanization and Westernization of Turkey by returning to their supposed roots - these authors are not of interest» (161, translation mine). Taking this composite gloss at face value, it seems that a potential text for Turkish-German study has a fair bit of qualifying labor to do indeed. It has to dismantle stereotypes, to deal explicitly with Germany and Turkey per se while it does so, to avoid sympathy with political Islam and reactionary vernaculars, and it cannot tread upon the projects of Europeanizing and Westernizing Turkey. This all should be done in German, though Hofmann does make room elsewhere for exceptions. Clearly, Hofmann has done a great deal to promote interaction, programming, and exchange between German and Turkish institutions, and the effects of his and his collaborators’ endeavors are having a positive transatlantic impact. Yet the kind of relevancy criteria set out above seem to unnecessarily constrain the complex epistemology that has always nurtured Turkish-German writing and thought. The work of Ören, Özdamar, and Dal - and also Tunç Okan, nazim Hikmet, Sabahattin ali, ahmet Haşim, ahmet rasim, Bilge Karasu, ahmet Mitat Efendi, and others before them - has been engaged in much more aesthetically and functionally ambivalent positional endeavors around Turkish-German lines of thought, many of which do indeed compli- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 386 11.11.14 17: 50 What is Turkish-German Studies up against? 387 cate the cohesion and definability of the field. This immutable fact leads me to believe that we have come to a moment in the arc of scholarly inquiry that requires an unmooring from such delineations of relevancy and cohesion, toward a renewed methodological pursuit of what Ören sought twenty-five years ago in the «as-yet-unuttered.» almost a decade ago on the other side of the atlantic, the preeminent Germanist and translator leslie a. adelson published a watershed monograph entitled The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (2005), which brought Turkish-German Studies to a new and vigorous level of theoretical speculation. With her book, adelson joined a small group of major monographers on the topic: including Kader Konuk with Identitäten im Prozeß (2001), azade Seyhan with Writing Outside the Nation (2001), and then, after the publication of adelson’s book, Tom Cheeseman and his Novels of Turkish Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions (2007), and Venkat Mani with Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (2007). The evolution in those titles is itself quite telling - the syntax of which is a turn away from identities and nations, as contested analytical containers, toward the claims and openings of cosmopolitanism. With her book on The Turkish Turn, adelson used the phrase «literature of Turkish migration» to consider the iconic position of ‹the Turk› in German literature from the fifteenth century onward: an unstable, overdetermined icon that itself posed for adelson a «riddle of referentiality» (17). accordingly, she proposed a critical «reconfiguration of the German national archive» (12, emphasis mine). adelson’s critical reorientation toward the German national archive was indeed a timely, majoritizing intervention poised to relieve Turkish-German authors and scholars of the «optical illusions,» «cultural fables,» and autoethnographic responsibilities routinely ascribed to, and expected of, them. This shift in focus however came with a downside, giving implicit methodological sanction for future scholarship pursuing «a Turkish turn» in German Studies to elide those aspects of the Turkish national archive, the Ottoman imperial archive, or indeed the transnational materials that were always too precarious to make it into an archive of any sort - even though these materials might tell counterstories crucial for «a new critical grammar of migration» in German-Turkish studies. Consider in this adverse archival context the following scene, in which a Turkish author walks into a German library: It was a modern and anonymous building. Inside were the types you always find in such libraries: housewives, old people with time to kill, unemployed men, one or two Turks and arabs, students giggling over their homework assignments, and all CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 387 11.11.14 17: 50 388 David Gramling other manner of stalwarts from the ranks of the obese, the lame, the insane, and the mentally handicapped. One drooling young man raised his head from his picture book to stick out his tongue at me. (Pamuk 202) Just hours before his death, the poet-hero of Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow, a resident of one of Western Europe’s premier publishing and finance capitals Frankfurt am Main, made his daily visit to this dystopic interior space: the city’s Central library. For over a decade, Ka (short for Kerim alakuşoğlu) had been living as a political exile a few blocks away on Goethestrasse, supplementing his government asylum stipend with honoraria from poetry readings before local Turkish audiences. On most days he sat in this library reading auden, Coleridge, and Browning. One evening, he left the library as usual, stopped by a green grocer on a side street off Kaiserstrasse, and was shot in the back three times. Ka’s body was found on the wet pavement beneath a pink neon K sign. as the only «witness» to his death, this illuminated K pulses above the ill-fated transnational author «in bright pink solitary splendor» (253). In Pamuk’s novel, Ka spends twelve years living in political exile in Frankfurt am Main - where he prophylactically refuses to learn German, because he worries about the negative effect of the German language on his soul. That is of course a very different way of speaking about such choices than framing them as choices of integration/ nonintegration into a given society or supranational entity like Europe. In the lobby of this anonymous library, the Frankfurt Stadtbücherei - which I take to be a reconstruction of Kafka’s Castle of Graf Westwest (Gramling, «Pamuk’s Dis-Orient») - a drooling young man sticks out his tongue at Ka, as if to instinctively expel the intruding author from the space. Indeed, the word dil in Turkish can be translated either as tongue or language. as we see from this moment of dystopian «contact,» Germany indeed plays a crucial figural role in Pamuk’s novel, but not as a space of aspirational negotiation, reconciliation, or understanding with the West, but rather as a space of Turkish settlement, exile, influence, and creativity - one that is somehow noncoterritorial and noncontemporary with the «Germany» presumed in, say, intercultural Germanistik. Pamuk’s Germany is a place where Turks, Kurds, and Turkish-Germans are in meaningful and complex pursuit of livelihoods that are rather oblique to, or agnostically nonaffirmative toward, Westernness, Germanness, integration, or Hofmann and Pohlmeier’s definition of Turkish-German literature. What uncanny and disorienting moment in a «history of contact,» or perhaps a thigmotactic moment of non-contact, might Pamuk’s novel offer Turkish-German studies at the outset of the twenty-first century? Ka’s limin- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 388 11.11.14 17: 50 What is Turkish-German Studies up against? 389 al, abjected position in the lobby of the German archive is indeed an indexical legacy not only of the exclusion of modern Turkish-language literature from Turkish-German studies, but also of the robust and wily tradition of Turkish Occidentalism since the mid-nineteenth century. Occidentalist figurality is indeed a widespread and vigorous facet at large throughout Turkish - and Turkish-German - literary modernity. However, it seems that these Occidentalist moves and dispositions have often been and continue to be blended out of the presumptive categories of analysis in Turkish-German studies. This is the case because Occidentalism doesn’t serve well as a resource for sociopolitical discourses that aspire first and foremost toward reconciliatory interaction through mutual, intercultural dialogue. among the Turkish and Turkish-German authors I know of who engage in modernist literary Occidentalism with a particular focus on Germany are zafer Şenocak (particularly in his newer Turkish-language novels), Murathan Mungan, Orhan Pamuk, Sabahattin ali, aras Ören, Güney Dal, zülfü livaneli, nâzım Hikmet, ahmet Haşim, ahmet Mitat Efendi, ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, and Bilge Karasu. These authors, however, are still more or less waiting in the lobby of German Turkish studies with Pamuk’s Ka --looking at the drooling man and his (dis)interpellating tongue. In some cases, Pamuk’s Snow among them, Turkish transnational literary modernity uses the West, Europe, and Germany as a symbolic space for reconfiguring or reconstructing domestic political questions that are otherwise unstageable in the Turkish context. Germany becomes a proxy mise-en-scène of sorts, or a quizzically modernizing space to be observed and refigured dispassionately and without commitment. This kind of Occidentalism is closer to James Carrier’s 1995 coinage than to Ian Buruma and avishai Margalit’s sense of it in 2004, in that its figural stance is characterized by distance, aestheticization, and agnosticism, rather than of enmity and anti-Western sentiment. Turkish transnational Occidentalism is a tradition of viewing, observing, cruising, or assessing the West from a variously appropriative and noncommittal functional stance - that of the flaneur, or the tourist, or the amateur-skeptic. To my mind, Occidentalism is not a mere reversal of Orientalism, by which the West/ Europe becomes the unchangeable static object knowable only to Eastern observers. nor is Occidentalism, as Ian Buruma and avishai Margalit claimed in their 2004 book, «the dehumanizing picture of the West as painted by its enemies» (5). What Buruma and Margalit refer to, somewhat sensationally, as the «venomous brew of Occidentalism» crowds out a much more modest and matter-of-fact tradition, more akin to the arabic word (El Esteğrab بارغتسلاا ) which means broadly «moving to, or existing, in the West.» The literary Occident of Turkish transnational modernity is some- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 389 11.11.14 17: 50 390 David Gramling thing similarly matter-of-fact and ambiguously motivated: it is a symbolic space loosely coextensive with European territorial and intellectual history, a space which houses many diffuse and often conflicting functions, dispositions, counter-histories, romances, fantasies, experiments of thought and figure. Texts with a literary occident are penned by authors who have necessarily gone through a process of appropriating Westernness through education or autodidacticism rather than by inheritance, and the primary feature of such occidentalist texts is that the Western symbolic space serves as a resource to explore questions that have an uneven or noncommittal relationship to the paradigms and concerns of their contemporaneous Western Europeans - by which I mean Western Europeans by birth or inheritance. These perspectives are as much a constitutive feature of Turkish-German literature as anything deliberately designed to dismantle or undermine stereotypes, or to mitigate misunderstandings in an ongoing intercultural dialogue. Kristin Dickinson, for instance, has researched the translations of Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werthers into Ottoman by ahmet rasim and a group of his contemporaries between 1886 and 1895 («recontextualizing late Ottoman Translations»). Dickinson’s analyses of these translations suggest that this collaboration in the post-Tanzimat period of Ottoman letters was something much more than a cultural importation or Westernization effort. rasim-and his colleagues rewrote and amended the Werther texts, domesticating and embellishing them, not in order to provide an intercultural window on Germany, but according to their own whims as universalist poets and aesthetes. around this time the Ottoman Orientalist ahmet Mithat Efendi, one of several Ottoman Orientalists on their way to an Orientalists’ convention in Poland in 1891, wrote his travelogue Berlin’de üç gün (Three Days in Berlin) in which he surveyed the modernizing city in much the same terms as other European Orientalists were simultaneously describing Istanbul. This tradition continued into the twentieth century, with travelogues by, for instance, the major Turkish poet ahmet Haşim, who wrote his Frankfurt Seyahatnamesi (Frankfurt Travelogue) on the occasion of a medical consultation he sought in Germany in the early 1930s. Indeed, when we look at all of the literary and proto-literary work linking Germany and Turkey, it is a vast field with little philological or disciplinary order to it. It is very much conditioned by the salutary neglect and opacity typical of confounded frontiers. Only a few comparatists are taking responsibility for it (among them of course nergis Ertürk, azade Seyhan, Kader Konuk, and Kristin Dickinson), and also only a few scholars in Middle East Studies, although there is more and more interesting work being done on this CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 390 11.11.14 17: 50 What is Turkish-German Studies up against? 391 arena in Turkey and in Turkish - for instance by Selçuk Ünlü (2005), Deniz Göktürk (2014), and ali Osman Öztürk (2000), among others. nonetheless, a general erasure out of the critical Occidentalism of Turkish and Turkish- German modernity has been shaping scholarship since the early 1990s at the latest. Its persistent elision in scholarly and public attention has been primarily structural, arbitrating what types of texts get predictably translated, commented, and then adopted into curricula - and under what aegis, book series, discipline, pedagogical and scholarly conventions, or university department these texts and traditions might be presumptively housed. a fascinating further case of Turkish modernist Occidentalism on German territory is Sabahattin ali’s novel Kürk Mantolu Madonna, or The Madonna in the Fur Coat. Written in 1943, it is a stirring love tale about a young wayward student from the city of Havran, whose businessman father sends him to Weimar-era Berlin to build character and learn about the soap trade. as any good study abroad student would do, raif spends his days sleeping and his evenings milling about in night clubs and galleries, and eventually falls in love with a Czech-German Jewish painter named Maria Puder. She schools him in the ways of German feminism and the classicist conservative strain of Neue Sachlichkeit painting. On their urban sojourns together raif encounters all the famed libertine features of Schöneberg: In front of a big store they call Ka De We, young men with their red boots and faces painted like women leered at the people on the street with beckoning eyes. […] The undampened exuberance of the post-war years was on display in all its nakedness. The state of the young men - their frail bodies, their bony faces, and eyes shining as if they had survived a brush with cholera - and the young girls, who thought the best way to revolt against the unjust and illogical constraints of society was to wantonly unbridle their sexual desires. (Translation by Ilker Hepkaner and myself, unpublished.) In part, the novel is of course an intertextual refiguration of Sacher Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) and a cultural study of urban Germany in the age of hyperinflation. Yet Kristin Dickinson («reading the Turkish republic») and Ilker Hepkaner («Who is the Woman in Furs? ») argue that the novel is primarily a palimpsestic vehicle for exploring the political hubris of the early republic of Turkey, and particularly its major intellectuals’ lockstep commitment to a particular form of social realism that was geared towards banishing Ottoman belletristic conventions from the new republican literary scene. against this backdrop, moving the show to Germany allowed the novelist Sabahattin ali to stage confrontations with his own modernist-Westernizing contemporaries and colleagues in Turkey by way of the proxy symbology and social landscape of Weimar Berlin. This was on one level a pragmatic case CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 391 11.11.14 17: 50 392 David Gramling of ‹hiding one’s valuables in one’s neighbor’s house,› since ali had been constantly in and out of prison for his literary-political transgressions in this period, and was eventually assassinated without his political critique of social realism ever finding much resonance. (Indeed, his other novels more or less conformed to the social realist genres of which the Berlin-based The Madonna in the Fur Coat was a not-so-veiled critique.) ali’s functionalization of Berlin for Turkish aesthetic and political purposes in the first half of the twentieth century leads us quite provocatively to the core of what I consider to be a thigmotactic method for Turkish-German thought---i.e., toward the persistent ill-fit between literary production itself and the relevancy criteria and principles of discursive cohesion poised to receive that production under the episteme of (intercultural) national philology. Indeed, this seems to be a problematic that ali himself anticipates in Madonna. In the novel, after several years in Berlin, the hero raif is eventually compelled to return home to Turkey, where he lives out his years as a downtrodden translator at an ankara bank, where the frame narrator of the novel shares an office with him. One day at the office, raif is reading over his own journal from his days in Berlin, and the narrator catches him in the act. The narrator asks: «What’s that Mr. raif? » It felt like I had caught him in a moment of delinquency, since he blushed and stuttered «nothing … Just a novel in German! » and closed the drawer right away. Still, no one at the office thought he could speak a foreign language. Maybe they were right, because his manner and comportment never signaled that he could speak any language at all. (Translation by Ilker Hepkaner and myself, unpublished.) This moment of «delinquency» that raif is caught in is, as I understand it, a kind of smoke signal for literary history, indexing the true nature of ali’s transnational misdemeanor in a compulsorily national age. ali seems all but oracular about the fate of his «German novel,» and he has his meek and exhausted hero raif beg the narrator on his deathbed to burn the manuscript and never to read it. This icon of early Turkish republican literature knows that this novel of his, one of his three, will fall on deaf ears precisely because of its wayward behavior toward the philological and political imperatives of his day. It is too German, too disinterested in promoting Turkish national coherence and distinction, too unsteady a building block upon which to found Turkish national literature in the wake of empire. and ali’s hunch was correct. While his other works became centerpieces of an emerging Turkish literary canon, the Madonna novel descended into functionless obscurity after its publication in 1943 and only began to resurface in the late 1990s. It was translated into German in 2008 by ute Birgi, amid a marked upswing in Turkish translating into German since 2000. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 392 11.11.14 17: 50 What is Turkish-German Studies up against? 393 In lieu of a conclusion, I’d like to reflect on a recent call for papers that circulated online for an upcoming German Studies conference. One of the qualifying criteria for submitting a proposal was framed as follows: «Wünschenswert, aber nicht verpflichtend, ist die Bezugnahme auf Gegenwartsliteratur, die in irgendeiner Weise demjenigen verbunden ist, was wir ‹deutsche Sprache› zu nennen gewohnt sind.» This is indeed a fascinating gesture - a welcome sign to anyone working in the far-flung domains of German Studies to recalibrate how they account for their linguistic relationship to the discipline. and yet it worries me a bit. The rhetorical basis for this call for papers is a shift from an ethnonational conception of disciplinary responsibility to a linguistic one. Where we used to see calls for ‹German literature,› we now issue calls for ‹German-language literature.› This shift, which took place first around twenty-five years ago, was of course progressive because panethnic or de-ethnicized (Gramling, «The new Cosmpolitan Monolingualism»). However, the opportunity costs for making that substitution in our scholarly work and disciplinary conventions are slowly making themselves visible. While ethnonational parameters for research and programming circa 1989 had taken no position on language as such, the category ‹German-language literature› causes an immediate elision, one that goes unremarked because of its apparently progressive cultural politics. We do not then notice what has gone missing or disinvited, including the Turkish transnational modernist tradition dwelling on German territory since the nineteenth century if not before. Such multilingual, translingual, code-switching, and otherly-languaged meanings - though made on German territory, through German institutions, or in complex contact with the same - are still, and sometimes increasingly, construed as too ‹far afield,› as belonging to «someone else’s story» (Buck- Morss 822). But it is often there - in the other-languaged satellite spheres of German and Turkish-German Studies - that we are to find our most compelling counterevidence, which in turn challenges the validity of many of our discursive formations around transnational topics, and the ways we tend to debate them. Indeed, as much as we may seek recourse to ‹intercultural Germanistik,› many of our objects of study seem to be calling for an interlingual Germanistik instead. as Turkish-German Studies now settles into a new period of permanence and recognition within German Studies and Germanistik, it is precisely the ill-fitting, excitable counterevidence on the borders of our discursive vision that can help nourish more capacious methods for the future, in keeping with Seyhan and Ören’s call for the «as-yet-unuttered» twenty-five years ago. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 393 11.11.14 17: 50 394 David Gramling Notes 1 See for instance Ören’s decisive focus on Europe in his Chamisso Prize acceptance speech in 1985 (Göktürk et al. 391). 2 Chicana Studies has struggled with and against similar dynamics. Essayist and scholar Gloria anzaldúa increasingly found herself over the 1990s to be the lightening rod for similar critiques as those that often accrue around many early voices in Turkish-German cultural production. Debra Castillo summarized anzaldúa’s predicament of positional utterance and reception as follows: [anzaldúa’s] most acute critics are often those who know her best and who come from the same South Texas background. She is too brash, too essentialist, not quite rigorous, not theoretical enough; her thinking, while grounded in her personal experience as a Chicana lesbian feminist from the Southwest of the united States, is nevertheless too abstract - it is, as Pablo Vila and others have pointed out, too utopian for a concrete reality that has always been informed more by border enforcers than border crossers. Mexican scholar María-Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba comments that anzaldúa’s transnational projections are likewise too limited and constrained by an exclusively united States understanding of the Mexican-american border region and its inhabitants, strangely omitting any concrete reference to Mexican scholars or the Mexican side of the border despite continually evoking its metaphoric presence. (261). Works Cited adelson, leslie a. «Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews. Cultural alterity, Historical narrative, and literary riddles for the 1990s.» New German Critique 80 (2000): 93-124. -. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. london: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ali, Sabahattin. Kürk Mantolu Madonna. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi. 1998. Buck-Morss, Susan. «Hegel and Haiti.» Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000): 821-65. Buruma, Ian, and avishai Margalit. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies. london: Penguin, 2005. Castillo, Debra. «anzaldúa and Transnational american Studies.» PMLA 121.1 (2006): 260-65. Cheesman, Tom. Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions. rochester, nY: Camden House, 2007. Dickinson, Kristin. «reading the Turkish republic against Weimar Germany: a Dual Critique of Modernity in Sabahattin ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna.» university of arizona. 23 March 2011. lecture. -. «recontextualizing late Ottoman Translations: a Turkish-German Comparative analysis.» Middle East Studies association. new Orleans, 10-14 October 2013. lecture. Göktürk, Deniz. «Imagining Europe as a realm of Transfiguration.» Critical Multilingualism Studies 2.1 (2014): 129-47. Gramling David. «Pamuk’s Dis-Orient: reassembling Kafka’s Castle in- Snow.» TRANSIT 3.1 (2007): n. pag. Web. 14 april 2014. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 394 11.11.14 17: 50 What is Turkish-German Studies up against? 395 -. «The new Cosmopolitan Monolingualism: linguistic Citizenship in Twenty-first Century Germany.»-Die Unterrichtspraxis/ Teaching German 42.2 (2009): 130-40. -. «The Caravanserai Turns Twenty: or, new German literature - Turns Turkish? »-Alman-Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi. Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur 24.2 (2010): 55-83. Haşim, ahmet. Frankfurt Seyahatnamesi. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2010. Hepkaner, Ilker. «Who is the Woman in Furs? : reading ali’s Madonna in the Fur Coat and Sacher Masoch’s Venus in Furs Together.» Middle East Studies association. 10-14 Oct. 2013. lecture. Hofmann, Michael. Deutsch-türkische Literaturwissenschaft. Würzburg: Königshausen & neumann, 2013. Hofmann, Michael, and Inge Pohlmeier. «Deutsch-türkische und türkische literatur. literaturwissenschaftliche und fachdidaktische Perspektiven.» Studien zur deutsch-türkischen Literatur und Kultur. Band 2. Ed. Michael Hofmann. Würzburg: Königshausen & neumann, 2012. 135-73. Konuk, Kader. Identitäten in Prozeß. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2001. Mani, B. Venkat. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. Iowa City: u of Iowa P, 2007. Mitat Efendi, ahmet. Berlin’de üç gün. Istanbul: notos, 2010. Ören, aras. «Chamisso Prize acceptance Speech.» Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005. Ed. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling and anton Kaes. Berkeley: u of California P, 2007. 391-94. Ozil, Seyda, Michael Hofmann and Yasemin Dayioglu-Yücel, eds. 51 Jahre türkische Gastarbeitermigration in Deutschland. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und ruprecht, 2012. Öztürk, ali Osman. Alman Oryantalizmi. 19. Yüzyıl Alman Halk Kültüründe Türk Motifi. ankara: Vadi Yayınları, 2000. Pamuk, Orhan. Snow. Trans. Maureen Freely. new York: Knopf, 2004. Şenocak, zafer. Zungenentfernung. Bericht aus der Quarantänestation. München: Babel, 2001. Seyhan, azade. «Introduction.» New German Critique 46 (1989): 3-9. -. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton uP, 2001. Teraoka, arlene. «Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back.» Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 77-101. Ünlü, Selçuk. 19. Yüzyıl Alman Edebiyatında Türkiye ve Türkler. Istanbul: Çizgi, 2005. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 395 11.11.14 17: 50 national History and Politics of Memory in Turkish-German literature ElKE SEGElCKE Illinois State university In the recently published volume Memory and Political Change (2012), aleida assmann states that «during the 1990s, the innovative term ‹culture of remembrance› was coined, providing a cultural framework» (assmann and Shortt 53) for the various debates about German national identity which emerged after Germany’s reunification. For the Turkish-German writer zafer Şenocak, national history indeed plays «a key role» in one of these debates, specifically «the question of whether a country is open for immigrants,» as he stated in 1995 in an interview with the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel («Darf man Türken und Juden vergleichen, Herr Şenocak? »). as Deniz Göktürk has observed more recently, the «nexus» between the «need to expand the [West German] workforce» after East Germany’s enclosure in 1961 and the beginning of labor migration in the form of a recruitment treaty with Turkey in the same year, for instance, «does not figure prominently in public memorialization of Germany as a divided and reunified nation» (86). Instead, the process of reunification with its renationalization marginalized Germany’s immigrants by revitalizing notions of the ‹nation-state,› a ‹homogenous› culture and ethnic categorization. While it is not possible «to immigrate into a country’s past» («Darf man Türken und Juden vergleichen»), Şenocak questions the notion of a shared ethnic memory which he sees closely tied to the question of collective guilt after the Jewish genocide of the nazi era. Having access to a shared history with the native population instead, he argues, would be important for the immigrants’ participation in shaping the German future, especially with regard to the third generation as well as for the peaceful development of the German nation-state. In her 2007 essay «Taking on German and Turkish History: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne,» Kader Konuk takes up the notion of the country’s past as a «closed door» (232) in the context of Germany’s memory culture and the Holocaust by explicitly referring to Şenocak but also to andreas Huyssen who engages critically with the issue in his 2003 article on «Diaspora and nation: Migration into Other Pasts.» In his discussion of migrating into another nation’s past, Huyssen poses the question whether it is «possible or even desirable for a diasporic community to migrate into the history of the CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 396 11.11.14 17: 50 National History and Politics of Memory 397 host nation» (154) and «even assume responsibility» for Germany’s «burden of auschwitz and the Third reich» (155). While Konuk acknowledges that «in recent years Turkish-German literature has taken up this challenge of developing the notion of a shared history» («History» 232), her own approach to an engagement of the Turkish diaspora with German history, however, differs considerably from Şenocak’s position to both history and the commemoration of the Holocaust. Whereas Konuk’s essay on Özdamar and German and Turkish history focuses on the question of how the Turkish diaspora «negotiates its role in Germany by engaging with the Holocaust as the most crucial moment of the German past» («History» 232), Şenocak pleads in his public statements and essays for overcoming this fixation on Germany’s traumatic past which he associates with the country’s ethnically defined «negation of the nation’s history» («Darf man Türken und Juden vergleichen»). In 1995, the year of commemorative events and of the beginning of the debate on the Holocaust Memorial, the author contends that in Germany, history is read as the diary of a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, the nation’s personal experience to which others have no access: packaging history in commemorative speeches and rituals has taken the place of Erinnerungsarbeit («Darf man Türken und Juden vergleichen»). Germany’s ritualized process of coming to terms with the past should therefore be replaced with a historiography «which speaks many languages» (Das Land 145). Thus for Şenocak to become a German means to «become implicated in German history,» although it seems «that the relationship of diasporic memory to the traditional memorial culture of the ‹host nation› is an important but understudied question,» as Huyssen acknowledges in his essay (153). although German memory culture is in flux, the public debates still remain «rigorously focused on things German» without asking what they «actually might mean for the Turkish-German community» (156). What it means to share a present with the Germans, but not their history, has become a focal point in Şenocak’s fictional and non-fictional texts after reunification which demonstrate that narratives can play an important role in rethinking cultural orientation and imagining a «new representation of the past» (assmann and Shortt 9), thereby contesting the public political discourse. This essay on Turkish-German entanglements will examine the ways in which Şenocak attempts to overcome ethnicised notions of nationhood, history, and memory culture in his recent writings by expanding the scholarly exploration of memory discourse to pre-1945 political and cultural Turkish contexts as reflected in his latest historiographical novel Deutsche Schule (2012), first published in Turkey under the title Alman Terbiyesi in 2007. I will relate this text to the author’s previous historiographical narra- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 397 11.11.14 17: 50 398 Elke Segelcke tive Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1995) and juxtapose it with both rachel MagShamhráin’s research on the Turkish-German alliance before and during World War I and Konuk’s scholarship on Turkey’s policy toward its minorities and Jewish-German émigrés, arguing that Şenocak’s linking of Turkish and German pasts transnationalizes Germany’s ethnically defined memory culture and Holocaust remembrance. In the absence of an explicit colonial relationship between Germany and Turkey, Şenocak in his recent essay collection, Deutschsein. Eine Aufklärungsschrift (2011), reminds his readers of the mostly forgotten links between German and Turkish history with regard to the shared experiences of World War I, genocide, expulsion, exile, and nationalist excesses in the twentieth century. Thus, the collective remembering of these experiences and their public discussion should, from his perspective, not only lead to the perception of the ‹other› but ultimately to the perception of the ‹self› in order to gain a critical insight into one’s own national history and multiple identity changes. In his collection of political essays on Deutschsein, Şenocak identifies Germany’s deviation from the Western paradigm of civilization as the main reason for the fact that in Germany migration and integration debates with their strong social components tend to turn inevitably into identity debates with ethnic, national, or religious connotations (Deutschsein 26). Constructions of identity become based not on universal values and civil rights but rather on exclusionary concepts that define German belonging in ethnic terms, thereby stressing national and cultural differences. The post-reunification debate on immigration, integration, and Islam was reignited by the controversial publication Deutschland schafft sich ab (2010) of the (SPD) politician Thilo Sarrazin and demonstrates the ongoing challenge to the German nation-state with regard to its immigrants, in particular its four million Muslims, whom the author deems difficult to integrate. With his sweeping claims about race, the unwillingness and inability of Turks and arabs to integrate, their intellectual inferiority, higher birth rates, exploitation of the welfare state, and the overall negative impact of Muslim immigration on a presumably stable German identity, Sarrazin sparked a national controversy as politicians, the media, and the general public offered widely differing opinions on the subject. The interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, saw Islam neither as essential for Germany’s changing society nor as part of its history (Biermann, «Für Friedrich»), thereby ignoring both the political and scholarly forms that German Orientalism took in the nineteenth and twentieth century. according to Friedrich, Western Judeo-Christian values remain the nation’s exclusive Leitkultur. But Suzanne Marchand reminds us in her intellectual history on German Orientalism in the Age of Empire CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 398 11.11.14 17: 50 National History and Politics of Memory 399 (2009) that German scholars were the pacesetters in oriental studies between 1830 and 1930, despite entering the colonial race late and exiting it early. Constructing a normative German ‹national identity,› therefore, can not only be instrumentalized «as a tool of distinction and exclusion,» but also ignores «divergent understandings of ‹Germanness›» as manifested, for example, in the numerous debates over East Germany’s legacy and memorials in a reunited Germany where «different cultures of collective memory» clash (arnold-de- Simine, Memory Traces 18, 19, 23). From Şenocak’s perspective, for Muslim integration to succeed, the legacy of German culture needs to be expanded from a Gedächtniskultur to a new Erfahrungshorizont whereby Islam in Germany would no longer be perceived as the ultimate essentialized ‹other› (Deutschsein 114, 122). Instead of focusing on the Muslim ‹other› in Germany’s ideologically driven identity politics with their clear-cut national «imaginaries of belonging» (Huyssen 150), Şenocak suggests a public memory discourse in the form of a dialogue with the immigrant population which focuses on the question of how the past shapes the present and a common future by recalling that twentieth-century German and Turkish history «had been entwined more than once,» a linking of past and present that may finally lead to the inclusion of Turkish immigrants and their German descendants in Germany’s memory culture («The Capital» 145, 146) and thereby also to a changed perception of German migration history as a part of national history. as the Turkish- German writer had previously reminded his readers in his novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft in the form of the narrator-protagonist’s counter-memory, among the mostly forgotten events of a shared history in the twentieth century is «the so-called brotherhood of arms in the First World War» in conjunction with the role of Goltz Pasha (the Prussian Field Marshal Wilhelm leopold Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz) who helped modernizing the Turkish army, served as commander-in-chief of Turkish forces in World War I, and «led the Ottoman Empire to defeat and dissolution side by side with the Wilhelmine Empire» («The Capital» 146). another reminder of a shared history in the novel concerns the leader of the Young Turks, Talat Pascha, who (as interior minister) was responsible for the deportation of the armenians in 1915 and fled to Germany after the armistice in Europe in 1918 where he was killed three years later by a young armenian in Berlin. The issue of a German-Turkish alliance has been recently taken up in an article on «Displacing Orientalism: Ottoman Jihad, German Imperialism, and the armenian Genocide» (2009) by rachel MagShamhráin who draws particular attention to the long-standing relationship between Wilhelmine Germany and the Ottoman Empire preceding World War I - for her also an CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 399 11.11.14 17: 50 400 Elke Segelcke attempt to address the «historical amnesia» surrounding the topic, «especially in the context of Turkey’s wish to accede to the Eu» and the ensuing controversy (146). With the completed project of the Oriental railway in 1888, linking Berlin directly to Istanbul and eventually to Baghdad, Germany «became aware of the potential that the Ottoman Empire held as an extraterritorial economic sphere of influence» (152) which would also have an impact on German foreign policy and its interest in keeping the Ottoman Empire intact. as MagShamhráin points out, Germany’s increasing imperialist agenda toward the East manifested itself in the plan to turn Islam against the British trade rival by instigating «the Ottoman Empire’s declaration of jihad on the Entente powers» (147) in 1914, thereby cutting «across traditional East-West cultural cleavages in the service of political and economic interests on both sides» (144). Turkey’s own hegemonic intentions at that time were «inwardly directed» (150) and consisted of a national project that was striving for an ethnically homogeneous, monocultural society. a new nationalistic political course of action had begun in 1908 under the leadership of the Young Turks who took over the government of the Ottoman Empire from Sultan abdülhamid II. rejecting the idea of a multiethnic state by emphasizing Turkish identity on the basis of a common history, religion, and language eventually led to the founding of the nation-state through Mustapha Kemal atatürk in 1923 which from then on excluded the minorities of the Greeks, Jews, and armenians as ‹foreigners› and ‹others.› For MagShamhráin, the systematic eradication of Turkey’s Christian armenian population and their essentialized ‹othering› as a homogenous fanatic group with a «religious-cum-racial loyalty that transcend[ed] their loyalty to the state» (157) provides «evidence of a more multidirectional Orientalism than is suggested by Edward Said’s idea of a hegemonic West representing and therefore controlling an essentialized East» (145). In accordance with its own political and economic interests during the time of Turkish persecution and in fear of an increasing russian influence in the Balkans, Wilhelmine Germany «took an anti-armenian stance» against their pro-russian fellow Christians in «what was cast as armenian sedition and secessionism» (151). By having «an ally as powerful as Germany,» MagShamhráin contends, the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of Talat Pascha felt that they could manipulate the Germans and thus «get away with this large-scale ethnic cleansing» (156) which also raises the question of Germany’s share of responsibility while at the same time foreshadowing its own Jewish genocide. as a response to constructions of collective national identities in public discourse, Şenocak wants to convey history as family history in the form of a discontinuous narrative with fragmentary individual biographies which are CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 400 11.11.14 17: 50 National History and Politics of Memory 401 composed of contradictory parts and open up new perspectives of the past from the point of view of later generations. In his novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft, history and memory with reference to the time of the two World Wars are dealt with in generational terms in the form of two different family histories, a maternal Jewish-German and a paternal Turkish one. as a persona of mixed Jewish-German-Turkish heritage, the novel’s narrator and protagonist is of a hybrid identity which should not be interpreted as a «notion of an ethnically defined historical responsibility» toward collective traumatic pasts, as Konuk implies in her essay («History» 245), but rather as a literary construct whereby the author ironically questions the German debate over a national and cultural identity that operates with misleading concepts such as «in-between cultures» as if some constructed homogenous groups would face one another «wie Fussballmannschaften,» as Şenocak explains in a conversation in 2003 with Tom Cheesman (Cheesman and Yeşilada 22). after inheriting his grandfather’s notebooks in arabic and Cyrillic script which he can only decipher with the help of a translator, the narrator starts to search for his roots in the family history of his ancestors, realizing with regard to the Holocaust and the armenian genocide that he is the grandchild of both victims and perpetrators. Jews and Turks are thus connected in an imagined context which transcends ideological and social differences of alleged ‹otherness› as the author points to the historical tradition of transferring the image of the Oriental from the Jews to the Turks. In the novel, a journalist of the Pan-European Organization writes an essay entitled «Die Türkengefahr in Europa» in which he warns about the «asiatisch-orientalischen züge» of a people who, in contrast to the Jews, do not waste time on arts and sciences but instead pose the question of naked power (Gefährliche Verwandtschaft 86). With reference to Germany’s dominant memorial culture with its ritualized practices regarding the Holocaust and its focus on «deutsch-jüdische Dichotomie,» Şenocak suggests in his family narrative that the undoing of this dichotomy by admitting the Turkish community into the nation’s memory discourse might release both parties «von ihren traumatischen Erfahrungen.» For their part, the Turks in Germany would have to discover the Jews not just as a part of the German past which they cannot share, but also «als Teil der Gegenwart, in der sie leben» (89). as a Turkish hero of the East, the narrator’s grandfather was involved in the armenian deportations and fought the Greeks on the Western front in anatolia in 1921. Thus, the paternal family history is directly connected to the militant nationalism of Turkey’s twentieth-century history, reflecting the policy of exclusion so often characteristic of the construction of a national state identity. During the time of classical German nation-building, Prussian historians like Heinrich von Treitschke CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 401 11.11.14 17: 50 402 Elke Segelcke concentrated on the ‹others› within and stressed «the non-compatibility of Jews with the German nation» (Şenocak, «auf ewig anders»). In light of the fear of Überfremdung and «at times violent linguistic and cultural assimilation» practices toward its Polish minority, Werner Sollers states in his 2005 essay «Goodbye, Germany» that «Germany has yet to build up a historical consciousness of its polyethnic past. […] [I]n the debates about ethnic diversity in Wilhelminian Germany can be found some building blocks with which some contemporary scholars could develop an outline of a polyethnic and cosmopolitan tradition» (Sollers). In his 2012 novel Deutsche Schule, Şenocak continues his explicit engagement with German and Turkish history by again reminding his readers in Turkey and in Germany of their countries’ multiple shared experiences in the twentieth century. This well-researched historiographical and political novel about issues of patriotism, identity, and political blindness expands the historical scope of Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft and ranges from pre- 1914 Berlin to Istanbul in the early 1940s. The extended Turkish-German entanglements during this period shed a particularly critical light on Germany’s exertion of influence on both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic as well as on Turkey’s contradictory agenda toward the nazi government and the links between German and Turkish forms of anti-Semitism. Whereas MagShamhráin’s essay raised the question of Germany’s share of responsibility regarding the armenian genocide, Şenocak’s novel seems to raise the question of Turkey’s share of accountability for both the fate of Turkish Jews and Jewish refugees from Europe, thereby acknowledging repressed events in Turkey’s history while at the same time transnationalizing Germany’s ethnically defined Holocaust remembrance and memory culture. In Deutsche Schule, the author narrates the life of a young officer of the Ottoman Empire (Salih Bey, born in 1881, the same year as Mustapha Kemal) who undergoes his military training in Berlin and participates as a German officer in World War I. as both a Turkish patriot and admirer of everything German, infatuated with the Wilhelmine Empire, the imperial Prussian army and its core values of discipline and honor, Salih believes in the German modernization of the Turkish military under Wilhelm II and idealizes the Waffenbrüderschaft between the two allies as a symbol of their Schicksalsgemeinschaft (30). The young officer’s politically shortsighted views correspond to the concurrent German propaganda campaign that glorified «the present military alliance,» as Florian Krobb observes in his article on «Turkey as Colonial Space in German World War I Writings.» at the same time, «orientalist fantasies» imagine a «future development in which Ottoman space would be transformed, modernized, and Europeanized in Germany’s image» (3). In CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 402 11.11.14 17: 50 National History and Politics of Memory 403 Krobb’s assessment, the self-image of Germans «allowed them to cast themselves as both civilizers (Volk der Schule) and modernizers (Volk der Organisation)» (9). after the collapse of the Wilhelmine Empire and the dissolution of its army, Salih remains in Berlin as a successful businessman and German citizen, adopting German nationalist ideas while also remaining a Turkish patriot. His belief in common Turkish-German interests and sense of belonging to both nations persists, causing him to continue working for the Third reich even after his return to Istanbul in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. Through the protagonist’s conspirational activities (such as exchanging reports about the disposition of the Turkish government toward Germany and England for information from nazi agents about the situation at the Eastern Front), Şenocak’s readers gain insight into the extent of nazi infiltration of neutral Turkey in the early 1940s. Istanbul became a transfer site for spies of different ideological schemes and «the city was alive with the competing intellectual and political agendas of Turkish nationalists on the one hand and German fascists on the other» (103), as Konuk states in her study East West Mimesis. Auerbach in Turkey (2010). as portrayed in the novel, nazi informants were present everywhere by taking advantage of well-established cultural organizations and institutions such as the German School Istanbul, established in 1868, and Teutonia, the first German Club in Turkey, founded in 1847. The latter became the most important headquarters for nazi propaganda where party officials from Berlin lectured about German Lebensraum (Deutsche Schule 52), leading Salih to wonder, in light of his own interest in a future Eurasia under Turkish-German authority, if this was to include Turkey. as a witness of key historical events of the twentieth century who had made the personal acquaintance of renowned contemporaries such as Talat Pascha and Enver Pascha (an organizer of the Young Turk revolution with a key role in the Ottoman entry into World War I on the side of Germany who had previously also served as an Ottoman officer in the imperial Prussian army), the protagonist is writing his memoirs during 1941 and 1943, the time of the German campaign in russia. In 1941, the year of Germany’s signing of a friendship treaty with Turkey and of its russian invasion, Salih sees the two countries again closely connected by a common destiny, wanting to serve both nations by pursuing the Pan-Turkic idea of Turanism, hoping that the German invasion would lead to a liberation of the Turkic peoples of russian Central asia, suppressed by Stalin, who in return would strengthen the German position in the russian campaign. Turanism as the idea of the unification of all Turkic people, however, promoted by Turkish national journals and writers during the 1930s, was a «racialist movement» that also disseminated CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 403 11.11.14 17: 50 404 Elke Segelcke «anti-Semitic propaganda,» as Konuk ascertains (East West Mimesis 84). In her study, she comments on Turkey’s contradictory political agenda toward Jewish minorities and the nazi government until 1944 when Germany’s defeat became obvious. Whereas Jewish-German émigré scholars «were greeted in Turkey not as Jews» but as «exemplary Europeans,» facilitating Western reforms and «overcoming the opposition between Orient and Occident» (88, 89), the «loyalty of Jewish Turks to the new nation» (82) was publicly scrutinized; a contradiction that Konuk explains with Mustapha Kemal’s «dual assimilatory policy,» requiring both conformity with the new nationally unified Turkish culture and the Turkish concept of westernization in order to achieve legitimation from the main European powers (83). The novel also touches on another historical event and contradictory Turkish policy that was applied toward Jews who attempted to flee the increasing anti-Semitism in Europe: the incident of the Struma in February 1942. The ship with 700 Jewish refugees on board was denied access to the Mediterranean by the British on its way to Palestine and sank in the Black Sea after having been attacked by the Soviets during its forced return to romania. The lack of Turkish commitment to save European Jews became also apparent in the government’s decision to allow only a few refugees to disembark in Istanbul and its general policy to refuse Jewish refugees transit to Palestine. In the novel, this incident raises Salih’s concern about the fate of his Jewish friend Karla from Berlin, about whom he had no news after having sheltered her as a refugee during her illegal journey through Turkey on her way to Palestine (Deutsche Schule 123). Karla opens his eyes to the ongoing Jewish deportations in Germany in the early 1940s and to the racial politics toward minorities in both countries. She criticizes both Salih’s and Turkey’s infatuation with Western Europe, expressing her doubts that Turks would ever be effectively transformed into Europeans. In light of the failed assimilation of European Jewry, Turks, like Jews, would always continue to be «die Orientalen» (105). Karla’s conclusions regarding the failed assimilation of Jews in Germany and the historical tradition of constructing Jews as Orientals correspond to Turkey’s lack of a «clear stance against the nazi pronouncements about Jews,» as Konuk asserts in her study, since a more explicit attitude might have questioned Turkey’s own assimilation practices and self-imposed transformation into Europeans by asking «whether Turks, like Jews, were bound to remain Orientals in the eyes of Western European Christians» (East West Mimesis 90). after Karla’s departure, Salih’s former world view begins to falter while his increasing skepticism toward Hitler’s military strategy and his sheltering of a German Jew arouse suspicion. He eventually falls out of favor with the German as well as Turk- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 404 11.11.14 17: 50 National History and Politics of Memory 405 ish authorities in Istanbul, ending up as stateless after losing his German citizenship. By linking both Turkey’s and Germany’s troubled historical legacies, Şenocak transnationalizes the remembrance of the Holocaust while also critically targeting the two countries’ assimilation practices, past and present. The novel goes beyond pointing out a shared Turkish-German history by calling particular attention to the question of how such histories can be remembered at a time of a changing memory politics and a changed perception of the nation’s identity. The author’s concern that past experiences should shape the present and, ideally, a common future in Germany’s memory discourse is reflected in the protagonist’s comment that memoirs should always be written for the future to increase the young generation’s awareness - not of the irrevocable past, but of the possibilities for the future (Deutsche Schule 33). His previous novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft ended with the narrator’s decision not to reconstruct but to invent the events surrounding his grandfather’s life in the form of a story according to the author’s belief «that the search for the truth cannot easily be documented,» so that «history/ story as document and invention becomes the book’s real protagonist» («The Capital» 146). Similarly, in his latest novel Deutsche Schule, the protagonist deems historical documents in memoir-writing only valuable in conjunction with individually recalled experiences since remembered persons and events are ultimately always «ein Produkt der Vorstellungskraft» (28). With regard to Salih’s non-contradictory sense of self as both a Prussian officer and Turkish patriot, the novel can be read as an ironic comment on Germany’s identity debates and a critique of the current migration politics with its cultural and linguistic assimilation practices which do not take into account dual cultural identities and loyalties or multilingualism. regarding German and Turkish concepts of national identity, the author questions notions of continuity, coherence, and a fixed ‹national character› by reminding the reader of the constructed nature of collective identities in light of the countries’ multiple historical caesuras and identity changes. as previously mentioned in the context of Turkey’s contradictory political agenda toward Jewish minorities and the nazi government, Turkish Jews were ostracized while Jewish- German émigré scholars were welcomed in the 1930s not as Jews but as Europeans to help westernize the young Turkish republic. In her study, Konuk attests to the manifold historical and cultural relationships between East and West by linking Turkey’s new concept of a secular modernity and «humanist movement» with its introduction of classical Western education and the intellectual heritage of ancient Greece and rome to the German influence on the Turkish educational reforms and thus on the country’s national renewal. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 405 11.11.14 17: 50 406 Elke Segelcke among the more famous German émigrés were intellectuals such as Ernst reuter (who should become Berlin’s first postwar mayor) and the philologist Erich auerbach who established the philological disciplines in Turkey and taught Western European literatures from the classical to the modern age at Istanbul university (East West Mimesis 61, 65). German professionals and academics played a significant and enduring role «in mapping a new cultural heritage onto Turkey’s national territory» and in creating «a common frame of reference for Turkey and the West» (54). However, as Konuk states, «recreating Turkey in the image of Europe came with its contradictions» (67) and at the expense of the country’s ethnic and religious diversity, including its disavowal of the Ottoman historical and cultural legacy. With regard to its philhellenic «humanist movement» (67) and aim to root the new Turkish culture in that of ancient Greece and in the Europe of the 1930s, it seems paradoxical that Orthodox Greeks were compelled to leave Turkey in the wake of the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1924. In light of the ethnicised notions of nationhood, a transnational approach to history should, from Şenocak’s perspective, not only lead to the perception of the ‹other› but ultimately to a stronger perception of the ‹self› and thus affect both the national and the diasporic memory. In this regard, narratives can change our perception and memory constructs of past events. With their biographical connotations and differing multiple generational perceptions of the past they play an important role in complementing historiography and, as azade Seyhan argues in Writing Outside the Nation (2001), in shaping «national consciousness» (8) both by instituting and supporting national myths and by recording and questioning what our contemporary society, history, and public memory often repress and forget. Works Cited arnold-de-Simine, Silke, ed. Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. Bern: Peter lang, 2005. assmann, aleida, and linda Shortt, eds. Memory and Political Change. london: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Biermann, Kai. «Für Friedrich gehört der Islam nicht zu Deutschland.» zeit.de. zeit Online, 3 Mar. 2011. Web. 25 aug. 2013. Cheesman, Tom, and Karin E. Yeşilada, eds. Zafer Şenocak. Cardiff: u of Wales P, 2003. Göktürk, Deniz. «Interrupting unity: The Berlin Wall’s Second life on Screen - a Transnational Perspective.» Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989. Ed. anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakrabort and linda Shortt. rochester, nY: Camden House, 2011: 82-99. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 406 11.11.14 17: 50 National History and Politics of Memory 407 Huyssen, andreas. «Diaspora and nation: Migration Into Other Pasts.» New German Critique 88 (2003): 147-64. Konuk, Kader. East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey. Stanford, Ca: Stanford uP, 2010. -. «Taking on German and Turkish History: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne.» Gegenwartsliteratur 6 (2007): 232-56. Krobb, Florian. «’Welch’ unbebautes und riesengroßes Feld’: Turkey as Colonial Space in German World War I Writings.» German Studies Review 37 (2014): 1-18. MagShamhráin, rachel. «Displacing Orientalism: Ottoman Jihad, German Imperialism, and the armenian Genocide.» Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture. Ed. James Hodkinson and Jeffrey Morrison. rochester, nY: Camden House, 2009: 145-65. Marchand, Suzanne l. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship. new York: Cambridge uP, 2009. Sarrazin, Thilo. Preprint of the chapter «Immigration and Integration.» Der Spiegel 23 aug. 2010: 136-40. Şenocak, zafer. Deutsche Schule. Berlin: Dağyeli, 2012. -. Deutschsein. Eine Aufklärungsschrift. Hamburg: edition Körber-Stiftung, 2010. -. Das Land hinter den Buchstaben. Deutschland und der Islam im Umbruch. München: Babel, 2006. -. Gefährliche Verwandtschaft. München: Babel, 1998. -. «The Capital of the Fragment.» New German Critique 88 (2003): 141-46. -. «auf ewig anders? » taz.de. taz.de, 25 nov. 2002. Web. 25 aug. 2013. -. «Darf man Türken und Juden vergleichen, Herr Şenocak? » Interview mit Karin Yeşilada. Der Tagesspiegel 13/ 14 apr. 1995: 26. Seyhan, azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton, nJ: Princeton uP, 2001. Sollers, Werner. «Goodbye, Germany! » TRANSIT 1 (2005): n. pag. Web. 25 aug. 2013. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 407 11.11.14 17: 50 Kaffeehausgeschichten. Politik der Gastronomie in Yadé Karas Cafe Cyprus MaHa El HISSY ludwig-Maximilians-universität München In Yadé Karas (*1965) roman Cafe Cyprus (2008) gehen Gastronomie und Politik miteinander einher. zu dieser Symbiose gehört auch, dass die rede über die Esskultur oft mit einem kolonial motivierten Bestreben verschränkt wird. Im Buch liest man etwa, dass man london, «wie McDonald’s es zuvor gemacht hatte,» von einem «Kebap Van» aus kolonialisieren (16), ja ein «Mc’Kebap- Imperium» gründen wolle (20), dass diese Stadt mit «Kebap-Shops» belagert oder mit Kaffee erobert werde (232), oder dass dem Protagonisten Hasan beim zwiebelschneiden Tränen in die augen stiegen, die seinen Eroberungsgeist anspornten (17). In einem zypriotischen Café in london, der titelgebenden Institution, hat sich außerdem eine Gemeinschaft von in England lebenden zypriotischen Männern um Kaffeehaustische geformt, die während «Mokkagespräche[n]» (50) über den zypernkonflikt debattiert - und zwar in all seinen Facetten. Dort ziehen sich zyprioten vom alltag in der englischen Metropole zurück, bilden eine art «unO-Versammlung» (50), die sich über die Probleme der zurückgelassenen Insel berät und von der Ferne aus eine lösung für politische Konflikte zu finden versucht. 1 Das Cafe Cyprus 2 , so die These im Folgenden, entsteht als diskursive Formation, die auf das kosmopolitische london antwortet und sich sprachlich, religiös und vor allem durch die politischen Debatten über zypern vom leben in der englischen Metropole abgrenzt. Dabei wird zu fragen sein, wie sich die Gemeinschaft der Stammkunden, auch symbolisch, formt, wie sie ihre Grenze nach außen zieht und verschließt, wer draußen bleibt, wer der andere der Gemeinschaft ist und wer die Macht besitzt, über die Inklusion oder Exklusion von Mitgliedern dieser Gemeinschaft zu entscheiden. Gerade im Kontext der Migration kommt der Gastronomie eine besondere rolle bei der Formung oder der auflösung von nationalen Gemeinschaften zu. 3 Denn jede Küche markiert eine Herkunft sowie eine zugehörigkeit, und manche nationale Gemeinschaften halten in der Fremde zusammen oder formieren sich gar erst über das Gastronomische, während die Küche, eine weiblich codierte häusliche Sphäre, als Metapher der Geborgenheit fungiert und die Erinnerung an die zurückgelassene Heimat wachruft. 4 Manche Fast-Food- oder Coffee-to-Go-Ketten lösen hingegen national definierte Gemeinschaften CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 408 11.11.14 17: 50 Kaffeehausgeschichten 409 zugunsten globaler Vermischungen auf. all dies sind Themen von Karas zweitem roman Cafe Cyprus. Karas Erzählung setzt die Geschichte des Deutsch-Türken Hasan fort, die sie in ihrem Debütwerk Selam Berlin (2003) begonnen hat. nach einem leben in und zwischen Istanbul und Berlin, den Schauplätzen von Karas erstem Buch, wird mit der englischen Metropole als Handlungsort eine dritte Möglichkeit für Migrationsgeschichten gegeben. Im pulsierenden und weltoffenen london der frühen neunziger Jahre scheint der Protagonist ein zuhause gefunden zu haben. Gleich in den ersten zeilen wird der Ich-Erzähler am Charing Cross in der nähe des Trafalgar Squares verortet, d.h. im Herzen londons, an der Kreuzung, die exakt den offiziellen Mittelpunkt der englischen Hauptstadt markiert. In diesem kosmopolitischen Panorama, das im ersten Kapitel des romans mit einem sprachlichen Mix und musikalischen Street Performances untermalt wird, ist die rede von der zerrissenheit zwischen West und Ost, Fremdem und Eigenem, Istanbul und Berlin, Eltern- und Kindergeneration schon längst passé. 5 Stattdessen scheint das leben in london als Ort jenseits von binären zuordnungen eine Selbstverständlichkeit zu sein, was dem Protagonisten während seiner ersten Erfahrungen in seiner neuen Heimat imponiert. Diese Faszination empfindet er vor allem als Gegensatz zu Berlin, das Hasan im Vergleich zu seinem neuen zuhause provinziell vorkommt. 6 Die Darstellung londons dient also als Beispiel für einen Ort, der dem entsprechen würde, was die kulturwissenschaftliche Forschung als Befreiung «aus dem Gefängnis der binären Dichotomien» (Bachmann-Medick 21) beschrieben hat. In einem lässigen, oft teilnahmslosen Ton erzählt Hasan von seinen Erlebnissen in der englischen Hauptstadt. Er fungiert in großen Teilen der Handlung trotz seiner Position als intradiegetische Instanz mehr als Beobachter denn als Teilnehmer am Geschehen. Dies ändert sich, als er sich in die türkischstämmige Modedesignerin Hannah verliebt, die er im Delikatessenladen kennenlernt, wo er seinen lebensunterhalt verdient. Hier verflechten sich Genuss und Begehren, Kulinarisches und leidenschaft, wobei Gastronomie im roman mehr als nur eine rolle bei der Bekanntschaft zwischen diesen beiden jungen Menschen spielt. nach dem eingangs beschriebenen bunten und weltoffenen londoner Setting zoomt der Erzähler nämlich auf das Cafe Cyprus, in dem sich trotz der politischen - und teilweise nicht harmonischen- - Meinungsvielfalt ein nationales zugehörigkeitsgefühl entwickelt hat. Dort hat sich eine zypriotische Männer-Community der älteren Generation zu einem kollektiven Gedächtnis politischer Ereignisse um Kaffeehaustische herum geformt und debattiert über Politik: «[E]ine Institution in Green lanes, eine art Sonderkommission für die zypernfrage» (Cafe Cyprus 37). CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 409 11.11.14 17: 50 410 Maha El Hissy anhand des Kaffeehauses als nationaler - und teils auch nationalistischer-- Ort wird im roman eine patriotische, antiglobale Konstruktion geschaffen, die der auflösung von Dichotomien zu widerstreben versucht. Dabei wird die Funktion des Kaffeehauses an der Schnittstelle zwischen Innen und außen, öffentlicher Sphäre und rückzugsort zugleich, als raum vorübergehenden aufenthalts variiert. zwar bleibt dieser Ort im Prinzip für alle offen und frei zugänglich; jedoch sondert sich die Gemeinschaft von zyprioten aufgrund ihrer sprachlichen Besonderheit sowie der eigenen Gewohnheiten, Gesprächsthemen und -kultur von der außenwelt - z.B. der englischen Einheimischen-- ab. Das Cafe Cyprus wird mithin als Ort privater politischer angelegenheiten codiert, der einigen wenigen Stammkunden vorbehalten bleibt. Hasan vergleicht es mit den «zigtausend Männercafes in Istanbul, die eine art arbeitsamt, nachbarschaftsladen, Sozialstelle, arbeitslosen- und rentnertreff waren» und ohne die es längst zu bedrohlichen unruhen und ausschreitungen in Istanbul gekommen wäre. «Eigentlich müsste der türkische Staat diesen Männercafes Steuerminderung geben» (248), so ein ironischer Kommentar des Protagonisten, denn dank dieser Gaststätten bleibe eine ganze politische Ordnung außerhalb des Cafes von potenziellem aufruhr verschont. nicht nur nach außen hin sollen etwaige Spannungen vermieden werden, sondern ebenso innerhalb des Cafés selbst und zwar durch eine möglichst neutrale politische Haltung, die sich beispielsweise am namen des Kaffeehauses zeigt. als Hasan nämlich einen Job in ali Beys Supermarkt und Delikatessenladen annimmt, führt ihm der Besitzer ali das benachbarte Café vor: «Drüben ist das Cafe Cyprus […]. Eine art Tochterunternehmen von uns. Meine besten Kunden. Mittags ist immer Hochbetrieb. auf die musst du besonders gut achtgeben und immer diplomatisch bedienen. Verstehst du? Deshalb heißt es auch Cafe Cyprus und nicht Kibris oder Kypros» (37). Das Café wird demnach auf einen englischen namen getauft und zwar nicht als ausdruck eines globalen, anglisierten lebensstils und genauso wenig als zeichen zypriotischer Integration und sprachlicher anpassung, sondern um etwaige Spannungen zu vermeiden, da das türkische Kibris oder das griechische Kypros eine politische Parteinahme implizieren würden. um also die Gefahr eines voreingenommenen Verhaltens zu meiden, sollen Konflikte durch die englische namensgebung - d.h. paradoxerweise durch die Sprache des Kolonialherren über diese Insel - ausgeblendet werden. In diesem politisch aufgeladenen Setting figuriert der Protagonist Hasan als Gesandter, als Vermittler zwischen dem türkischen Supermarkt und dem griechisch-türkisch-zypriotischen Kaffeehaus: Hasan als außenstehende Figur, als der andere der Gemeinschaft, der eine neutrale Position einnehmen und die zunächst offen gebliebenen rechnungen von den Kaffeehauskunden einfordern soll. Er kann sowieso - wie die Erzählerstimme CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 410 11.11.14 17: 50 Kaffeehausgeschichten 411 kundgibt - nichts außer diplomatisch-neutral bleiben, auch wenn er es anders wünschte, und dies aus sprachlichen Gründen. aufgrund des dialektalen Kauderwelsches nämlich, das die Gäste beim Kaffeeklatsch reden - ein «angloturco-cypriot-Dialekt» (42), der zudem im stereotypen mediterranen Temperament und in simultan verlaufenden Gesprächen geführt wird - bleibt Hasan keine andere Option als seine Funktion als rechnungsführer beizubehalten, wobei kapitalistische Bestrebungen generell wenig im Sinne des Besitzers ali liegen. Dessen unternehmen verfolgt weder imperialistische ziele noch soll es Exotik und ein Multi-Kulti-ambiente heraufbeschwören. Genauso wenig strebt er eine Expansion durch das Kulinarische oder die Etablierung einer exotisch-zypriotischen Küche auf englischem Boden an. Ganz im Gegenteil: Die Gäste im Kaffeehaus sind mehr um nationale Trennung bemüht, die schon mit der erwähnten sprachlichen Isoliertheit ansetzt und mit (Streit-)Gesprächen über politische Fragen fortgesetzt wird. Sicherlich ist die Sprache eine wesentliche Komponente, die zur Konstruktion von Gemeinschaften führen kann, wie Benedict anderson schon in Imagined Communities aufgezeigt hat (vgl. 37-46). als nämlich die Erfindung des Buchdrucks dazu führte, so anderson, dass Texte in einer einheitlichen Sprache verbreitet wurden, in der dialektale Trennungen aufgelöst wurden, imaginierten sich Individuen als Einheit, als nation, und zwar zusammen mit anderen Personen, die sie nicht kannten. Im zypriotischen Café zeigt sich eine entgegengesetzte Bewegung: Dort prägt die Klientel einen Dialekt, der sich aus verschiedenen Sprachen zusammensetzt und somit die zugehörigkeit zu einer Gruppe inszenieren soll. nur im «anglo-turco-cypriot-Dialekt» können sich die angehörigen der vermeintlich selben Gemeinschaft unterhalten, möglicherweise auch, damit keine der Parteien sich sprachlich vernachlässigt sieht und die neutrale Position nicht gefährdet wird. Während der englische name des Cafes seine Fassade ziert, bleibt diese auch lediglich eine Fassade und zwar im doppelten Sinn: Hinter der Offenheit, die die englische namensgebung suggerieren könnte, verbirgt sich eine verschlossene, intern verfeindete Gruppe. Dies ist eine wiederholte Bewegung im Text: Jedes Mal, wenn man glaubt, von einer Gemeinschaft sprechen zu können, führt sie sich selber ad absurdum und zersetzt sich wieder. Ein weiteres Beispiel hierfür ist die sonderbare Kartierung zyperns, die die Klientel im Café unternimmt. In andersons argumentation spielt die landvermessung ebenfalls eine wichtige rolle, denn nicht nur die Verbreitung einer nationalsprache über die Printmedien führt zur Entstehung imaginierter nationen. In der überarbeiteten Fassung seines Buches erweitert er seine ausführungen, indem er neben den Printmedien drei «Institutionen der Macht» 7 nennt, die zur Visualisierung von imaginierten Gemeinschaften geführt und somit zu ihrer Selbstwahrnehmung als Einheit beigetragen haben, CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 411 11.11.14 17: 50 412 Maha El Hissy u.a. die landkarte bzw. die landvermessung, die Kolonialmächte in den Kolonien durchführten (vgl. 163-85). Die visuelle, durch Farben hervorgehobene abbildung von Herrschaftsgebieten, die linien, Grenzen, längen- und Breitengrade und schließlich das große bunte Puzzle aus verschiedenen ländern-- all das verhalf Gemeinschaften dazu, sich als homogene Einheit zu sehen. Interessanterweise unternimmt die Kundschaft im Cafe Cyprus ein ähnliches Verfahren der Kartierung, allerdings, wohl kaum überraschend, mit Hilfe gastronomischer utensilien. Im Cafe sind Politik und Essen dermaßen ineinander verzahnt, dass man auch mit Besteck und Kaffeehausmobiliar komplexe politische Ereignisse darstellen kann. Dabei wird die ganze Geschichte zyperns auf den Tisch gepackt: Teegläser, Teelöffel, aschenbecher, Streichholzschachteln werden in Werkzeuge verwandelt, um sowohl geographische Orte als auch Kriegsgerät darzustellen und auf diese Weise komplexe militärische und strategische zusammenhänge zu erklären. und wenn die Tischplatte nicht mehr ausreicht, um beispielsweise die entscheidenden Ereignisse des Sommers 1974 zu rekonstruieren, in dem türkische Streitkräfte nordzypern besetzten, dann breitet sich die anwesende Männergemeinschaft eben im ganzen Café aus und gestaltet es zu einem architektonischen Modell der insularen zypriotischen realität um. Da werden alte Stühle zu türkischen Schiffen, Ventilatoren zu Fallschirmspringern und das blaue linoleum am Boden zum Mittelmeer: So komplex, gar verworren sind die zypriotischen angelegenheiten, um deren repräsentation die Klientel bemüht ist. In diesem absurden Kriegstheater jedoch hört die Inszenierung bei einer möglichst realistischen Wiedergabe historischer angelegenheiten auf. Keine Stühle, Tische, kein Besteck, mit denen man etwaige lösungen inszenieren könnte; dies scheint nicht im Interesse der Kundschaft zu liegen, denn damit müsste die eine Gemeinschaft in die andere aufgehen, d.h. die imaginierte Einheit der Gruppe aufgegeben werden. Frei nach dem Motto divide et impera führt die detailgetreue Darstellung der zypriotischen realität stattdessen automatisch zur nachbildung der unsichtbaren Green line, jener Demarkationslinie, die nordvon Südzypern trennt, und zwar um potentielle Kollisionen zwischen den zerstrittenen türkischen und griechischen Parteien zu vermeiden, die im Cafe Cyprus nicht aufgehoben, sondern durchaus vertreten sind: Eine nation im Kleinformat, die sich zu konstruieren glaubt, im Prozess ihres Werdens sich allerdings segmentiert. Es ist genau diese trennende linie, die auf einer Metaebene für eine weitere Isoliertheit und unvermeidliche abgrenzung sorgt. Denn diese Gemeinschaft will sich zwar nach außen hin als homogen zeigen und weist somit ‹Fremde› zurück, bleibt allerdings intern heterogen, ja gar widersprüchlich und zerstritten. Das Ironische an diesem imaginären raum ist, dass jeder Versuch einer erstrebten nationalen union darin grandios scheitert; dafür sorgt allein schon die CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 412 11.11.14 17: 50 Kaffeehausgeschichten 413 Vielfalt an Stammkunden, die sich zudem nicht eindeutig, z.B. als griechische oder türkische zyprioten, bezeichnen lassen. Stattdessen treffen sich in diesem Cafe «türkische und griechische Hardliner» (Cafe Cyprus 52), «Yunan Bozmasi» (88), was so viel wie «griechische Bastarde» heißt, eine islamisch-nationalistische «Mullah-Partisanen-Fraktion» (88) und schließlich die «aristoteles-Platon-Fraktion» (52) - so nennt ali eine Gruppe gemäßigter zyprioten aus den verschiedenen Parteien -, die von Einheit und gemeinsamer zukunft träumt. letztere sieht den deutsch-türkischen Hasan tatsächlich in einer Funktion als politischer Gesandter, der als zeitzeuge der Wiedervereinigung zwischen West- und Ostdeutschland die zerstrittenen zypriotischen Parteien über realistische Chancen der Einheit beraten soll - eine Vision, die von konservativen Stammkunden sofort zurückgewiesen wird. Denn anders als die zyprioten teilten die Deutschen die gleiche Geschichte, Sprache, Kultur und religion und könnten sich deshalb wiedervereinigen (53). auf zypern, so die argumentation eines der Stammkunden, sei dies hingegen nicht der Fall. Mit dieser Begründung führen die Stammkunden ihre eigenen homogenisierenden Bestrebungen, die sie im Cafe praktizieren, ad absurdum. allein die neugeschöpften Bezeichnungen zur Beschreibung dieser Gruppen zeugen schon von einer großen Vielfalt und Heterogenität; davon, dass die alten Männer im Kaffeehaus «[s]chließlich […] aus osmanischen [sic] Fleisch, griechischen Knochen und zypriotischem [sic] Wein [bestanden]» (51). und genau deswegen soll eine Demarkationslinie gezogen werden, anhand derer genau das wiederholt wird, was das Cafe Cyprus mit seiner abgrenzung von der londoner außenwelt bewirkt, nämlich Vermischungen zugunsten nationalistischer Gruppierungen aufzulösen. Mit der Grenzziehung sollen die Widersprüche innerhalb der Gemeinschaft kaschiert werden, ja die Tatsache, dass sie nicht die Einheit ist, die die Kaffeehauskunden nach außen hin vortäuschen, dass diese scheinbare Einheit bei genauerem Hinsehen, was schließlich durch den außenstehenden Erzähler Hasan erfolgt, in Bruchstücke zerfällt. letztendlich handelt es sich um eine Gruppe, die zwar einen «anglo-turco-cypriot-Dialekt» spricht, d.h. in mehrfachen Sprachen und Dialekten bewandert ist, jedoch keine interne Verständigung bewerkstelligen kann. Während seiner Betrachtungen gelangt Hasan zum Schluss, dass «[d]ieser aufbrausende Greco-turco-anglo-Mix nicht zusammen passte; auch historisch waren Türken, Griechen, Engländer selten in Harmonie miteinander gewesen» (47). Genauso wenig passt dieser Mix zusammen wegen der religiösen Vielfalt, die unter einem Dach vertreten ist und die dazu führt, dass die Gruppe sich selber als solche auflöst. Dabei weist religion eine andere rolle im Prozess der Gemeinschaftswerdung auf als die der Sprache: Die Sprache bzw. der einheitliche Dialekt, der im Cafe Cyprus gesprochen wird, führt nämlich zur abgrenzung CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 413 11.11.14 17: 50 414 Maha El Hissy der zypriotischen Kundschaft nach außen hin. Der Versuch, sich nach innen zu formen, erfolgt und misslingt sogleich durch die religion. 8 Hasan beobachtet nämlich, dass «Musa, Isa, Jusuf und Yayah mit am Tisch [saßen] - wenn man ihre namen übersetzte, dann hießen sie Moses, Jesus, Josef und Johannes, somit war die halbe Bibelgeschichte jetzt bei Tee und Tavla 9 vertreten» (52); eine Gemeinschaft, die sich jedoch gleichzeitig über lösungsvorschläge für den zypernkonflikt wundert, sich fragt, wie ein Mehmet sich denn mit einem Costas vereinigen soll (53) und somit aufgrund ihrer religiösen Verschiedenheit als Gruppe zerfällt. Die Ironie besteht darin, dass an diesem Ort Speisen und Getränke über die Kraft verfügen, Menschen zusammen sowie wieder auseinander zu bringen. Die zyprioten suchen zwar das Cafe wegen des Mokkakaffees auf, streiten sich allerdings, weil einige der muslimisch-türkischen Klientel ihre Teilhabe am zemzem-Wasser, dem heiligen Wasser aus Mekka, bemerkbar machen (vgl. 92-99) und sich dabei von den «Christen, noch dazu orthodoxe[n]» (54) Griechen abheben wollen, die alkohol und Schweinefleisch konsumieren. auf diese unterschiede will die zypriotische Klientel ihre Differenzen, ihre interne zerrissen- und zerstrittenheit und vor allem die unvorstellbare Einheit auf der zypriotischen Insel zurückführen. Da sich keine dieser Gruppen vorstellen kann, auf diese symbolisch beladenen Speisen und Getränke zu verzichten, muss die zypernfrage einstweilen ungelöst bleiben. Dabei zeigt sich diese Widerspenstigkeit im Kaffeehaus nicht nur bei religiösen Themen, sondern ist allgemeine Maxime der zypriotischen Gemeinschaft, gewissermaßen das Tischgebet, das sie ständig murmeln. und wenn sich eine Chance zur Verbindung mit der außenwelt bietet, dann wird diese so gedreht, dass sie lediglich die Kriegswunden der zypriotischen Klientel wieder aufleben lässt, denn diese will sich eigentlich nur der Erinnerung an die Vergangenheit hingeben. als ali Bey nämlich seine Beziehung zur Kundschaft verbessern möchte und dem Cafe einen Fernseher und eine Satellitenschüssel schenkt, dient der technische apparat, der beispielsweise vom Krieg in Bosnien berichtet, zum einen der reaktivierung der Erinnerung an die Massaker und aufstände von 1967 und 1974 auf zypern und gibt somit anlass für anhaltende Versammlungen und politische Debatten. 10 zum anderen manifestiert sich im Fehlen jeglicher externer Kommunikationsmittel eine antiquierte Haltung der Klientel. Überhaupt scheint die nationalistische Gemeinschaft im Cafe Cyprus in einer nostalgie zu schwelgen, die ihrer anti-globalen Orientierung nachdruck verleiht: Freiwillig wollen die versammelten zyprioten weder am jungen lifestyle-london noch am technischen Fortschritt der letzten Jahrzehnte teilhaben. Stattdessen ziehen sie sich zurück in eine vergangene Welt, wie man sie aus Schwarz-Weiß-Filmen kennt und die die Erinnerung an die zurückgelassene Insel vergegenwärtigt. In diesem Kaffeehaus dienen die Medien nicht CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 414 11.11.14 17: 50 Kaffeehausgeschichten 415 der Verbindung mit der londoner umgebung, wie beispielsweise Jürgen Habermas oder Stefan zweig die rolle der Medien in Kaffeehäusern, etwa in England oder Österreich, charakterisieren; da blieb der Kontakt mit den Geschehnissen der außenwelt vor allem über Printmedien erhalten, da trafen sich Menschen, um über deren Inhalte zu diskutieren. In den englischen Kaffeehäusern in ihrer Blütezeit zwischen 1680 und 1730, so Habermas in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), trafen sich Privatpersonen und debattierten über alles, was in den Printmedien zu lesen war. Der Kontakt zum politischen alltag sollte aufrechterhalten bleiben und «die Konversation in Kritik, Bonmots in argumente» (Habermas 91) verwandelt werden. 11 anstatt also einer kleinen klerikalen oder höfischen Gruppe vorbehalten zu bleiben, wurde der Inhalt moralischer Wochenschriften, Tagebücher, Briefe zum öffentlichen Diskussionssujet der Klientel. an eine ähnliche Funktion der Printmedien in den Wiener Kaffeehäusern im Fin de Siècle erinnert Stefan zweig in seinem Buch Die Welt von gestern (1944). Für ihn sind diese Gaststätten «eine art demokratischer, jedem für eine billige Schale Kaffee zugänglicher Klub, wo jeder Gast für diesen kleinen Obolus stundenlang sitzen, diskutieren, schreiben, Karten spielen, seine Post empfangen und vor allem eine unbegrenzte zahl von zeitungen und zeitschriften konsumieren kann» (45). Er vermutet schließlich, dass nichts wie die Kaffeehäuser in Wien «so viel zur intellektuellen Beweglichkeit und internationalen Orientierung Österreichs beigetragen [hat]» (45). «So wußten wir alles,» so zweig weiter, «was in der Welt vorging, aus erster Hand, wir erfuhren von jedem Buch, das erschien, von jeder aufführung und verglichen in allen zeitungen die Kritiken und artikel» (45). Die Debatten in diesen Kaffeehäusern brachten zunächst literarische, dann auch politische und soziale Bewegungen hervor. Wieder mit anderson gesprochen, wäre dies ein Beispiel dafür, wie eine nation en miniature sich dank der Printmedien und der Erfahrung einer gemeinsamen Sprache als solche imaginieren kann, eine Erfahrung der Kollektivität, die dann entsteht, wenn man Geschehnisse, so zweig nochmals, «nicht mit zwei, sondern mit zwanzig und vierzig augen [verfolgte]; was der eine übersah, bemerkte für ihn der andere […]» (45-46); es ist eine Gemeinschaft, die sich als solche ergänzt und zu einem Ganzen zusammenfügt. Ganz anders verhält sich die ansammlung von Personen im zypriotischen Café, das kein «demokratischer […] Klub» sein kann oder will. Stattdessen will die Kundschaft Kaffeehausgeschichten über ihre bittere Vergangenheit erzählen. an diesem Ort lässt sich in der Tat eine Hinwendung zur oralen Erzähltradition beobachten, wie sie etwa aus der arabischen Kaffeehauskultur bekannt ist und deren Hauptfigur der Hakawati ist, eine Figur aus der Volkstradition, die vor allem in den Kaffeehäusern im Damaskus des beginnenden neunzehnten CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 415 11.11.14 17: 50 416 Maha El Hissy Jahrhunderts aus bekannten Werken vorlas, selber Geschichten erzählte, dabei meist Figuren aus diesen Erzählungen spielerisch darstellte und die Klientel mit Sagen, Märchen und Geschichten mit fröhlichem ausgang unterhielt. 12 Sicherlich trug diese Figur dazu bei, dass sich eine Gemeinschaft, eine art kollektives Volksgedächtnis formte, wie wenn die Kundschaft dank eines Erzählers ihre Vergangenheit, Kultur und literatur memorierte. Diese Tradition kann aber im Cafe Cyprus nur in begrenzter Form gepflegt werden. aufgrund der dort herrschenden zerstrittenheit käme kein einzelner Erzähler in Frage, denn damit würde man eine der beiden verfeindeten Parteien als die herrschende deklarieren. Dabei lässt sich darüber spekulieren, ob das Fehlen eines autoritativen Erzählers mit seiner Funktion als Mnemotechnik eines Tages dazu beitragen könnte, die Kriegswunden, die in den Gesprächen erinnert werden, in Vergessenheit geraten zu lassen. 13 Sicherlich hat Hasan teilweise die Funktion eines Erzählers inne, allerdings in einem besonderen Sinne. aufgrund seiner Mission wird ihm die passive Teilhabe an den Gesprächen im Café ermöglicht. als partiell Eingeweihter, der durch seine türkische abstammung auf die geschichtlichen Hintergründe sensibilisiert ist, kann er dem leser einen Einblick in diesen gesonderten Ort gewähren. Hasan überwindet zwar die Barriere der Exklusion, muss allerdings in diesem Kaffeehaus - und darin besteht eine paradoxe Funktion dieses Erzählers - immer schweigen, um etwaige Kollisionen zwischen den Parteien zu vermeiden; so die Warnung ali Beys gleich zu Beginn der Handlung. Solange er die fälligen Geldbeträge einsammeln muss und dabei als stummer zuhörer an diesem Ort weilt, kann er seine eigene Geschichte nicht erzählen. Es ist die stagnierte Haltung seiner Klientel, die letztendlich dazu führt, dass der Protagonist sich von diesem Ort sowie dieser Gemeinschaft trennen möchte. Dabei resümiert er über die Generation, die aufgrund der globalen Migrationsbewegungen einen niedergang erlitten hat: Das waren sie also, die jungen zyprioten mit ihren welligen schwarzen Haaren, strahlenden Gesichtern und dunklen augen. Sie erinnerten mich an den jungen Marcello Mastroianni, Marlon Brando und Paul newman. Sie waren Söhne der schönen Insel zypern und des stürmischen Mittelmeers. und hier in Green lanes waren sie jetzt nur noch alte, ausländische Männer, mit eingefallenen Wangen, hängenden Mundwinkeln und grauen Schnurrbärten, die nach Tabak rochen. Für mich kamen sie aus einer alten Welt, in der es noch keinen Fernseher, kein Telefon gab, wo man abends zu den nachbarn ging, um radio zu hören, oder am Wochenende mit Kind und Kegel ins Open-air-Kino, um einen türkischen liebesfilm in Schwarzweiß zu sehen […]. (Cafe Cyprus 90) zwischen diesen zeilen klingt Bitterkeit über verlorene zeit und sichtbare Dekadenz durch; eine Erkenntnis, die dazu führt, dass der deutsch-türkische CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 416 11.11.14 17: 50 Kaffeehausgeschichten 417 Protagonist sich eindeutig von den Wünschen, Träumen und lebensvorstellungen dieser Generation abgrenzt, ja gar befreit, und letztendlich beschließt, das lifestyle-london in vollem umfang zu genießen: «Ich wollte nicht wie diese alten mit den zerknitterten Gesichtern und tiefhängenden Mundwinkeln enden, nein ich wollte london erobern» (284). Während Hasan eine Figur verkörpert, die von der englischen Metropole als Ort jenseits von Essentialismen fasziniert ist, lebt die Elterngeneration freiwillig wie in einem Exil, in dem sie davon träumt, eines Tages zur Heimatinsel zurückzukehren, wenn sich alle politischen Konflikte aufgelöst haben. Die jüngere Generation von Migranten dagegen widerstrebt diesen realitätsfernen Wünschen und nostalgien und beabsichtigt ihr eigenes Cafe zu eröffnen, mit dem sie die bereits erfolgte loslösung von nationalistischen Orientierungen ebenso gastronomisch markieren will. Hasans Cousin Kazim nämlich schmiedet Pläne, die er dem Protagonisten offenbart: Er möchte ein «Coffee house the third place» (232) ins leben rufen, ein unternehmen, das er im jungen Designerstil gründen will; rappelvoll, bunt, durchgestylt soll dieser Ort sein, d.h. das genaue Gegenteil zum antiquierten ambiente des Cafe Cyprus. Damit wiederholt die jüngere Generation zwar die Suche nach einem Ort, der seine Bedeutung und Funktion aus einer widerstrebenden kulturellen Orientierung gewinnt, aber eben nicht aus der einer vergangenen (nationalen) Kultur wie der der Elterngeneration. «london mit Kaffee erobern und den Tee zum Teufel jagen» (232) lautet der Plan des Cousins, der in der Kaffeekultur eine Möglichkeit zur abgrenzung von der englischen Kultur der Teehäuser sieht. Das neue Kaffeehaus verabschiedet sich von jeder nationalen Definition, soll nur trendy, bunt und global sein. Im laufe der Handlung vollzieht Hasan tatsächlich eine endgültige loslösung von Cafe Cyprus. nicht einmal als Vermittler oder als neutraler zuhörer will er an den Kaffeehausgeschichten teilhaben, denn viele der alten Stammkunden waren einfach noch zu sehr Betroffene der zypernteilung. Sie schleppten die Geschichten von früher mit sich herum wie eine Kugel am Bein. Ich wollte endlich mit Menschen zu tun haben, die nicht bis zum Hals im Sumpf der Vergangenheit steckten und immer tiefer einsanken. (202) Hasans rückzug von den Geschehnissen im zypriotischen Kaffeehaus macht sich narrativ auf mehreren Ebenen bemerkbar: Wie anfangs erwähnt, wandelt er sich vom passiven Beobachter im Café zum aktiven Teilnehmer am Geschehen in london; die zeit im Cafe Cyprus markiert somit ein Stadium der Stagnation, das seine ankunft in london verzögert. Er verlässt das Café und wandert dabei nicht nur nach london, sondern auch in die Diegese ein. Im Text nimmt darüber hinaus nun auch die zahl der Fußnoten ab, in denen politische zusammenhänge sowie kulinarische Spezialitäten erläutert und Fremdwörter für den leser übersetzt werden, als verschwände mit dem Ende von Hasans CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 417 11.11.14 17: 50 418 Maha El Hissy Mission im Cafe Cyprus auch das, was dem leser befremdlich vorkommen könnte, aus dem Text. Trotzdem bleibt dieses Café die zentrale, titelgebende Instanz des romans, den Kara nach ihrem Erstling Selam Berlin vielleicht auch «Merhaba london» hätte nennen können. Das zypriotische Cafe ist samt seiner Erinnerungen, Debatten und Streitgespräche, mit denen es überfrachtet ist, impulsgebend für eine Geschichte über geschlossene Gemeinschaften, über globale Orte sowie junge Protagonisten, die von diesen fasziniert sind. Die Vergegenwärtigung der zypriotischen Geschichte auf englischem Boden und vor allem die Wiederholung der zersplitterung, der zerstrittenheit, die Darstellung der Green line und dies in Green lane, im Herzen londons, - all das lässt das Kaffeehaus als Mikrokosmos vieler Debatten über den Beitritt der Türkei in die Eu erscheinen sowie über die damit verbundene Forderung der Eu, dass die Türkei den Eu-Mitgliedstaat zypern anerkennen müsse, bevor die Verhandlungen über den Beitritt aufgenommen werden könnten. Einige Stammkunden im Cafe Cyprus sind, wie bereits erwähnt, «eher reformisten und Pragmatiker,» die «über einen Musterland-Fahne-nationalismus hinaus waren und einfach an einen anschluss an Europa und die Eu dachten» (54). Möglicherweise offeriert die autorin am Beispiel dieser Gruppe einen Hoffnungsschimmer für die jüngere Generation. Denn diese sucht keine archaische Gesellschaft, in der sie ein isoliertes leben führen würde, sondern plädiert mit ihrem lifestyle für eine Strategie der Vermischung. Karas Darstellung ist sicherlich eine harmonisierende, denn mit der männlichen Hauptfigur Hasan steht die autorin der hypertrophen Männlichkeit in der deutsch-türkischen literatur und im deutsch-türkischen Film entgegen, wie sie sich etwa in der Figur des virilen ‹Kanaken› zeigt. 14 Hasans Entwicklung verkörpert eher die Tendenz einer literatur des Turkish-German Settlement (Cheesman). Ihm gelingt eine ankunft trotz - oder vielleicht aufgrund-- seiner Mobilität in london. Der deutsch-türkische Protagonist steht für eine Generation von Deutsch-Türken, die der Debatten über Migration und Integration überdrüssig geworden ist. Darum verlässt er auch das wiedervereinigte Berlin, wo er sich tagtäglich mit diesen Fragen konfrontiert sah. Die jüngere Generation, jahrzehntelang die Sorgenkinder der Migration, scheint sich zurechtgefunden zu haben. Denn es ist nicht Hasans kosmopolitische Geschichte, die hier in diversen Sprachen erzählt wird - diese überrascht in der deutsch-türkischen literatur nicht mehr und gilt eher als überholt -, sondern die Geschichte einer alternden Generation von Migranten, die zu einem archiv der Migration geworden sind. Diese Tendenz lässt sich in den letzten zehn Jahren zunehmend in der deutsch-türkischen literatur und im Film beobachten: «Gegenwärtig macht sich die Figur des rentners bemerkbar, die allegorisch zu deuten ist: Die Migrationsgeschichte wird alt» (El Hissy 271). 15 Parallel dazu CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 418 11.11.14 17: 50 Kaffeehausgeschichten 419 verläuft das globale Setting der jungen Generation, das von reisen und Mobilität gekennzeichnet ist und sich damit von der Elterngeneration der rentner abgrenzt (vgl. El Hissy 271); eine kosmopolitische Haltung, mit der die immobile lokale Verhaftung der älteren Generation abgelehnt wird. Beide Gruppen bedingen sich gegenseitig, ja formieren sich als reaktion auf- und im Verhältnis zueinander. Das Cafe Cyprus schließt sich anhand seiner eigenen Sprache sowie seiner religiösen Besonderheit nach außen hin ab und weist die londoner Community als potenzielle Kaffeehauskunden (sowie die Geschichte der deutschen Wiedervereinigung als Beispiel einer gelungenen Einheit) von sich zurück; es formiert sich damit als Mini-nation, die sich über die abgrenzung gegenüber jedem ‹fremden› Einfluss definiert. «Wir sind nicht die anderen! »-- so könnte die Formel lauten, nach der diese gastronomische Gemeinschaft sich zusammenfindet, wobei sie, laut dieser Formel, nur in relation zu den anderen entstehen kann. Die alternative Idee eines «Coffee house the third place» wiederum entsteht als antwort auf diese abgesonderte Sphäre, der die jüngere Generation nicht angehören will. Die Offenheit der jüngeren Generation zeigt sich schließlich auch in den Topographien des romans: So ist Hasan, nachdem er abschied vom Kaffeehaus genommen hat, in außenräumen, auf Flohmärkten, auf den Straßen von london unterwegs und entfaltet sich als global citizen mit deutsch-türkischem Hintergrund. Notes 1 Im Gegensatz zu Karas Debütroman Selam Berlin, der bisher mehrfach in der Forschung analysiert wurde, gibt es bis dato nur einige wenige arbeiten zu ihrem zweiten roman Cafe Cyprus, der Gegenstand der vorliegenden analyse ist. Vgl. hierzu: roy 2011a und 2011b. zur analyse von Selam Berlin vgl. u.a.: Stehle 2010 und Fachinger 2011. 2 Im Folgenden verweist Cafe Cyprus auf das Kaffeehaus. Das kursiv gesetzte Cafe Cyprus bezieht sich auf den Titel von Karas roman. 3 Vgl. hierzu vor allem: lillge und anne-rose 2008. zu den politischen aspekten der Gastronomie vgl. vor allem: Counihan 1997, 281-411. 4 Beispiele für deutsch-türkische Bücher und Filme, in denen Gaststätten und Essen eine besondere rolle für die Migrationsgeschichte spielen, sind Osman Engins Tote essen keinen Döner. Don Osmans erster Fall (2008), aslı Sevindims Candlelight Döner: Geschichten über meine deutsch-türkische Familie (2005) oder Fatih akıns Soul Kitchen (2009). 5 auch in Selam Berlin sind viele dieser aspekte bzw. dieser Trennungen von relevanz, die nach der Wiedervereinigung aktuell hinterfragt werden. In diesem roman sind das Private und das Politische verklammert. Der Mauerfall führt nämlich eine Wende im leben des Protagonisten Hasan herbei, als im wiedervereinigten Berlin das Geheimnis gelüftet wird, dass Hasans Vater schon seit Jahren eine zweite Ehe in Ostdeutschland führt. Ähnlich wie die deutsche nation, die ihre Grenzen - auch im Verhältnis zu Eingewanderten - neu definieren muss, werden auf der privaten Ebene des Deutsch-Türken Familienverhältnisse CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 419 11.11.14 17: 50 420 Maha El Hissy und Verwandtschaften neu etabliert. Der Mauerfall wird zum Ereignis, das auf mehrfacher Ebene zum Hinterfragen binärer Kategorien führt. 6 In Cafe Cyprus liest man beispielsweise: «Die legere art und Weise, wie diese Menschen mit ihrer Herkunft und ihrem jetzigen londoner leben umgingen, hatte mir am anfang fast die augäpfel rausgerissen, weil ich das nicht von Berlin gewohnt war» (Kara 2008, 170). 7 anderson spricht von «institutions of power» und nennt neben der landkarte auch den zensus und das Museum. (anderson 2006, 163) 8 Die abgrenzung nach außen und die Formung nach innen analysieren rosa, Gertenbach et al. unter den «Mechanismen der Vergemeinschaftung.» Vgl. hierzu: rosa 2010. 9 «Tavla,» so die Übersetzung in einer Fußnote im Text, ist «Backgammon.» 10 Satellitenschüsseln, die viele Dächer in Berlin schmücken und dem Empfang türkischer Sender dienen, wurden oft als zeichen der abkapselung in einer türkischen Welt und einer nicht gelungenen Integration verstanden. Dazu äußerte sich u.a. die deutsche Politikerin türkischer abstammung Bilkay Öney in einem Interview und meinte, dass die Integrationsdebatte an manchen Migranten vorbei gehe: «Das sind insbesondere solche Migranten, die ihre Fühler und ihre Satellitenschüssel [sic] richtung Herkunftsland ausgerichtet haben» (Öney 2011). 11 Habermas’ obige aussage bezieht sich auf die Salons in Frankreich, deren rolle bei der Entstehung öffentlicher Meinung er allerdings in mancher Hinsicht mit der der Kaffeehäuser in England gleichsetzt. 12 Diese Erzähltradition pflegen einige deutsch-arabische autoren wie z.B. der deutsch-syrische rafik Schami oder der deutsch-libanesische Jusuf naoum. letzterer ist vor allem bekannt wegen der Kaffeehausgeschichten des Abu al Abed. 13 Die mediengeschichtliche und -theoretische Frage nach der Verbindung zwischen Schrift, rede und Gedächtnis ist eine sehr alte und geht auf Platons Phaidros zurück. Im Dialog zwischen Sokrates und Phaidros steht zur Debatte, inwiefern die Erfindung der Schrift das Gedächtnis schwächen kann, da man aufhören würde zu memorieren und sich im Gegensatz zur mündlichen Erzähltradition lediglich auf das niedergeschriebene verlassen würde. 14 Diese sind beispielsweise reichlich im Werk von Feridun zaimoğlu zu finden, z.B. die Figur des ‹Kanaken,› den er für die literarische Interviewsammlung Kanak Sprak kreiert hat, die zwei Freunde Hakan und Serdar im Briefroman Liebesmale, scharlachrot oder die Figur des Gotteskriegers aus dem Erzählband Zwölf Gramm Glück. Vgl. hierzu zaimoğlu 1995, 2000 und 2004, 122-156. Yeşilada spricht von einem «virilen Künstlertypus mit deutschtürkischer Identität,» den u.a. autoren wie Selim Özdoğan, Filmemacher wie Fatih akın oder Schauspieler wie Mehmet Kurtuluş prägten. Vgl. Yeşilada 2009, 120. 15 Man denke außerdem an die Vaterfiguren Yunus Güner in Fatih akıns Gegen die Wand (2004) oder ali aksu in Auf der anderen Seite (2007). Works Cited anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. london, new York: Verso, 2006. Auf der anderen Seite. Dir. Fatih akın. Corazón International, 2007. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. «Dritter raum. annäherungen an ein Medium kultureller Übersetzung und Kartierung.» Figuren der/ des Dritten. Erkundungen kultureller Zwischenräume. Ed. Claudia Breger und Tobias Döring. amsterdam, atlanta: rodopi, 1998. 19-36. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 420 11.11.14 17: 50 Kaffeehausgeschichten 421 Cheesman, Tom. Novels of Turkish German Settlement. Cosmopolite Fictions. rochester, nY: Camden House, 2007. Counihan, Carole, and Penny van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture. A Reader. new York: routledge, 1997. El Hissy, Maha. Getürkte Türken. Karnevaleske Stilmittel im Theater, Kabarett und Film deutsch-türkischer Künstlerinnen und Künstler. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. Engin, Osman. Tote essen keinen Döner. Don Osmans erster Fall. Kriminalroman. München: dtv, 2008. Fachinger, Petra. «Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin». The Novel in German since 1990. Ed. Stuart Taberner. new York: Cambridge uP, 2011. 241-54. Gegen die Wand. Dir. Fatih akın. Wüste Filmproduktion, 2004. Habermans, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. Kara, Yadé. Cafe Cyprus. zürich: Diogenes, 2008. -. Selam Berlin. zürich: Diogenes, 2003. lillge, Claudia, and anne-rose Meyer, eds. Interkulturelle Mahlzeiten. Kulinarische Begegnungen und Kommunikation in der Literatur. Bielefeld: transcript, 2008. naoum, Jusuf. Kaffeehausgeschichten des Abu al Abed. München: dtv, 1993. Öney, Bilkay. «Türkische Milieus sind gewalttätiger als deutsche.» deutsch-tuerkischenachrichten.de. Deutsch Türkische nachrichten. unabhängige zeitung für Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur, 23 May 2011. Web. 1 apr. 2014. rosa, Hartmut, lars Gertenbach, et al., eds. Theorien der Gemeinschaft zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 2010. roy, Kate. «Yadé Kara, Cafe Cyprus: new Territory? » Emerging German-language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century. Ed. lyn Marven und Stuart Taberner. new York: Camden House, 2011a. 195-213. -. «Die u-Bahn als ‹unterirdisches Babel› im london von Yadé Karas Cafe Cyprus und im Paris von leyla Sebbars Métro: Instantanés.» Metropolen als Ort der Begegnung und Isolation interkulturelle Perspektiven auf den urbanen Raum als Sujet in Literatur und Film. Ed. Ernest W.B. Hess-lüttich. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter lang, 2011b. 473-90. Sevindim, aslı. Candlelight Döner: Geschichten über meine deutsch-türkische Familie. Berlin: ullstein Taschenbuch, 2005. Soul Kitchen. Dir. Fatih akın. Corazón International, 2009. Stehle, Maria. «Transnationalism meets Provincialism: Generations and Identifications in Faserland, Kurz und schmerzlos, and Selam Berlin.» Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture. Ed. lauren-Cohen Pfister und Susanne Vees-Gulani. rochester, nY: Camden House, 2010. 269-86. Yeşilada, Karin Emine. «‹nette Türkinnen von nebenan› - Die neue deutsch-türkische Harmlosigkeit als literarischer Trend.» Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration. Ed. Helmut Schmitz. amsterdam, new York: rodopi, 2009. 117-42. zaimoğlu, Feridun. Kanak Sprak. 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft. Hamburg: rotbuch, 1995. -. Liebesmale, scharlachrot. Die neuen Leiden des jungen Ali. Hamburg: rotbuch, 2000. -. «Gottes Krieger.» Zwölf Gramm Glück: Erzählungen. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004. 122-56. zweig, Stefan. Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2006. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 421 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing archives: History and Memory in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn MErT BaHaDIr rEi̇SOğlu new York university «Studies of immigrant cultures,» leslie adelson claims in 2002, «often tend to stress an obsessive longing for the lived pasts and familiar locales left behind» («Back to the Future» 103). By shifting the focus of Turkish-German literature from the figure of the isolated guest worker to reconfigurations of cultural memory through the medium of literature, adelson recommends investigating the «Turkish lines of thought» that «engage more pointedly with a highly mediated German past en route to a future that Germans and the Turks among them will most certainly share» (103). a further challenge, already suggested by adelson when she calls for «a scalar understanding of interactive contexts,» lies in reincorporating the Turkish archive, the traces of the Turkish past that have reached us via publications and audiovisual materials, into our studies without falling into the trap of situating these works between two «essentially different» cultures (The Turkish Turn 11). a comparative methodology that studies both German and Turkish archives becomes especially pertinent in the case of a novel like Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998), the second part of her semi-autobiographical trilogy, since the political histories of both countries play an important role. While the novel’s historical setting (Berlin and Istanbul of the 1960s) points towards the internationalist aspirations of the student movement, the interaction between German and Turkish archives is hardly visible at the level of the plot. The interaction lies in the way the novel brings together the leftist literary cultures of both countries and in the similarity of problems posed by German critics like Michael Schneider and Hans-Christian Buch, who assess the successes and failures of new Subjectivity in depicting the German student movement in the aftermath of 1968, and Turkish literary critics such as Murat Belge, who, in the 1970s, wrote about the novels that depict the Turkish student protests. reading Özdamar’s novel through the lens of these debates shows us that her novel addresses these problems both in content and in form in such a way that the two debates enter into contact and give rise to solutions unforeseen by their contributors. as a result of this contact, both archives are changed in unpredictable ways. The first CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 422 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 423 issue concerns the relationship between authorial subjectivity and history. The German expressionism debate of the 1930s, particularly the lukácsian requirement of transcending one’s relationship to the environment in order to depict historical events realistically with a grasp of the totality of social and political relations, forms the conceptual background of both Turkish and German debates about the successes and failures of the literature about the student movements of the 1960s. This common conceptual heritage shows that national archives cannot be conceived of as essentially separate entities. Özdamar expands the horizon of the Turkish debate by utilizing documentary modes of literature that were neglected by Turkish critics of the time. The second common problem posed by the aforementioned Turkish and German critics is literature’s relation to mourning. While mourning for the losses of the student movement is interpreted by Michael Schneider as a way of highlighting subjectivity’s role in literature, for Murat Belge and his followers it is expressed through communal elegy, a genre that violates the lukácsian dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity. Mourning also concerns the narratability of history, since past traumas can resist literary expression by requiring either total silence or factual testimony. Özdamar reconfigures this communal aspect of mourning and thereby makes the Turkish archive more visible by reconnecting it to the German one in new and inventive ways that reveal the heterogeneous and ever-changing nature of both archives. analyzing the similarities and differences between the two aforementioned debates allows us to see their relevance for reassessing Özdamar’s novel and to understand how her thematic and formal concerns can be seen as closely related to the Turkish and German archives. While lukács’s concept of totality is no longer a criterion to evaluate literature’s relationship to history today, transcending one’s immediate surroundings to achieve critical distance vis-à-vis historical events is still important in the context of Turkish-German literature. Here distanciation no longer signifies an epistemological exercise in which the subject grasps the totality of social relations. It is rather interpreted materialistically as the result of mobility. Detaching oneself from one’s environment means physical and mental displacement. andreas Huyssen’s concept of «diasporic memory» is such an example. Writing about the differences between «national» memory and «diasporic» memory, Huyssen argues that the latter differs from the former in that it does not «[present] itself as natural, authentic, coherent» or «homogeneous» (152). For him, it is rather «cut off, hybrid, displaced, split» (152). It is precisely this «displacement» that seems to single out Özdamar’s representation of Germany in 1968 from others according to several scholarly analyses. When anıl Kaputanoğlu ascribes «ein ‹neues Sehen›» to the narrator’s CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 423 11.11.14 17: 50 424 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu perception of Berlin stemming from her «ständiges unterwegssein» (which is also interpreted as «politische Subjektwerdung»), dislocation is seen not only as the condition of a fresh outlook, but also the prerequisite of political responsibility (268, 271). In addition to «[marking] an emergent individuality,» this departure to Germany even means, in Elizabeth Boa’s analysis, «the first step towards acquisition of the literary medium through which the narrator will recuperate lost time» (533). B. Venkat Mani also follows the same line of reasoning when he utilizes Huyssen’s terms and claims that the narrator of the novel displays «a studied distance and detachment» (Cosmopolitical Claims 117). For him, this also means that the narrator «remains anchored in multiple national frameworks without a complete identification with and investment in any one of them» (117). a similar interpretation is also provided by Monika Shafi who states that the narrator of Özdamar’s novel is «a sympathetic but unaffected observer of the German scene» (214) who has a «far more complex and cosmopolitan perspective on the events than the German students» (215). In all these analyses, mobility gives rise to a richer understanding of the German past and enables the narrator to experience the real internationalism of the student protests. as such, distanciation is still important for contemporary readings of Özdamar’s novel due to the role of mobility. For some critics, alongside the diasporic mobility of the author, the temporal distance that separates Özdamar from 1968 has important implications for literary renditions of this time period. Ingo Cornils claims that while the novels written in the 1970s - notable examples being Peter Schneider’s Lenz (1973), Katrin Struck’s Klassenliebe (1973) and uwe Timm’s Heisser Sommer (1974) - treat the protests with «nostalgia or conceit,» such affective attachment is replaced by attempts at «remembering and re-evaluation, perhaps even historicisation» in more recent works («long Memories» 91). Susanne rinner also subscribes to the same periodization when she claims that the novels that came out in the 1970s were «seemingly unmediated and therefore authentic insights into the experiences of the students» while those that appeared after 1989 led the public to a self-critical remembering through a «more reflective approach» (34). The critic’s sympathies lie with the latter: the novels written after 1989 can construct «a cultural memory» (16) and «represent a plurality of memories» that might contradict each other much more effectively (17). Distanciation is not only based on spatial but also on temporal coordinates. In addition to giving the narrator a unique international perspective, mobility can also be expected to reveal the connections between German and Turkish movements. The narrator’s relationships with German, Greek and Spanish communists throughout the novel attest to the transnational charac- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 424 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 425 ter of the movement and the vibrant political culture of Berlin. Yet, the transnational connections of the protests all intersect in the figure of the narrator who establishes contacts with people from different countries. When it comes to the dialogue between the movements in Germany and Turkey without the mediation of a central character, it is more difficult to talk about a transnational network. This becomes clear when an international meeting of students is organized at Istanbul university in Turkey. The festival of leftist students from Europe and Turkey is interrupted by the icon of the Turkish student movement, Deniz Gezmiş, who shouts: «In Mittelost gibt es Krieg, in Vietnam gibt es Krieg, aber ihr tanzt hier zu amerikanischer Musik. Tod dem amerikanischen Imperialismus, es lebe der revolutionäre Kampf der Völker der Welt» (Özdamar 248). The dialogue, initiated by a shared preference for music, comes to an abrupt end. This episode is followed by a conversation among the narrator’s friends and her father about the difference between Germans and Turks according to whether they feel better on the sea or in the forest (248). What starts as the collective meeting of leftists from several countries ends in the declaration of an essential difference between Turks and Germans. That Deniz’s name means «sea» in Turkish only seems to highlight essential differences between the two movements. It conveys the idea that the gravity of the political situation in Turkey does not tolerate enjoyment of oneself. But it is possible to interpret this dialogue in a different way. The images of the sea and the forest do not highlight essential differences between Turks and Germans. The markers of supposedly essential identities do not refer to people, but to different environments with the sea and the forest standing for mobility and stability respectively. Detachment and mobility as the preconditions of establishing transnational relations become the traits of not only the Turkish guest workers in Germany that the reader encounters in the first part of the novel, but also of the Turkish leftists in Turkey. as such, one should look beyond the narrator’s mobility on the surface for a communication that is not immediately visible in the novel. If a more subterranean communication between the two movements exists beyond the figure of the narrator, one possible source is the history of the student movements in both countries. However, the Turkish and German archives do not seem to intersect here. Instead, what one finds at first is an ineliminable gap that seems to have been opened by the fictional figure of Deniz Gezmiş in the novel. While Susanne rinner claims that «the political situation in Turkey is significantly different» due to the «brutal regime» (135), Monika Shafi avers that the reader «could be tempted to argue that [the narrator’s] portrayal of the Turkish student movement shows the more significant issues at stake» (216). Elizabeth Boa, who also argues that the situation is more seri- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 425 11.11.14 17: 50 426 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu ous in Turkey, goes further by suggesting that even fiction itself runs short of testifying to the gravity of the situation in Turkey: The veneer of fiction is very thin in this last chapter which exemplifies the need to resist theories which would undo distinctions between history and invention. (Tortured bodies are not a discursive construct; whether they were tortured is not a matter of competing fictions, but is either true or false, though why may be a matter of political debate). (537-38) The difference, at this point, no longer concerns the severity of the political situations in the two countries. It is rather the difference between reality and fiction. Once representing violence and trauma becomes a problem, the playfulness of both the movement and the fiction gives way to either silence or the bare facts of testimony. reconsidering Germany’s 1968 by comparing it to the movements in countries in which the situation is seen as more serious in its causes and consequences is certainly not unique to these critics. at issue here is not only 1968 itself, but also its aftermath, namely the German autumn of 1977. Cornils already reminds us that many literary works written after the 1980s establish a link between 1968 and 1977 («Joined» 152), and scholars like Gerd Koenen are of the opinion that the causes of the actions of raF and the red Brigades are very different since the West German republic was not in danger of an impending fascism at the time (28). Certain Turkish journalists and intellectuals writing in the 1970s are also of the same opinion, as in the case of Burhan Felek who speaks of the harmony between the capitalists and the workers in Germany in contrast to Turkey, where workers were very active in the protests (cf. Tek 218). needless to say, a comparison of the left in Turkey and Germany is beyond the scope of this paper. The differences between the two movements, however, have implications for the consideration of the Turkish archive’s role in Özdamar’s novel. Stopping at the history of violence that cannot be reworked through literature might give us a narrow view of the Turkish archive by limiting it to the scope of national history. Where «invention» fails, the turn away from fiction to testimony invites the reader to interpret the second part of the novel within the context of modern Turkey’s history. The partial and subjective testimony of the narrator, who owes her detachment from her immediate surroundings not to a higher and more objective standpoint but to constant mobility, is then juxtaposed to the objective and macro-historical picture of Turkey. Historiography here provides us the lukácsian totality of social relations to make sense of the novel’s relationship to the Turkish archive. Moreover, this archive is presumed to be unchanging and self-identical. But silence in the face of unrepresentable violence or partial and subjec- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 426 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 427 tive reports of historical facts are not the only options for Özdamar. When B.- Venkat Mani interprets her novel «as an extension of a Brechtian play» and resorts to the traditional Turkish Meddah-plays in his analysis, a different way of considering Turkish and German archives beyond macro-history becomes visible («The Good Woman of Istanbul» 52). This approach focuses on genres, literary histories and histories of ideas. In short, not «the history» but micro-histories are of utmost importance. Micro-histories as various components of the national archives can also include threads that traverse multiple cultural and historical configurations. When rinner claims that transnationalism can be defined as the use of a shared language across borders as well as common cultural representations in theory, film, book and music, she points towards such a micro-history. Thematically, this cultural transnationalism is most apparent in Özdamar’s work in the emphasis on the role of movie houses, which play a certain role in bringing leftists both in Germany and in Turkey together to watch films mostly by European auteurs. as Bodo declares in the novel, «Filme sind die einzige gemeinsame Sprache dieser Welt» (153). Delving into this archive of cultural exchanges bypasses the silence of solemnity. Very much like the dialogue about the sea and the forest, the Turkish student movement’s relation to the European one turns out to be complex and heterogeneous. What appears to be homogeneous and self-sufficient inside the national archive, then, reveals itself to be always changing and mobile like the narrator of the novel. In this regard, it is fruitful to closely investigate literary debates. as debates, they already mark a plurality of different voices that disrupt the presupposed homogeneity of the national archive. The debates that I believe bridge the two cultural contexts are the discussions around «new Subjectivity» in Germany and the writings on the March 12 novels («12 Mart romanları») by Turkish literary critics. The «new Subjectivity» debates of the 1970s in Germany can be seen as the continuation of the debates around realism in the 1960s, when, with the rediscovery of Brecht against lukácsian realism, a new avant-garde questioned the possibilities of politically engaged literature (Briegleb and Bullivant 313). after the heyday of documentary literature’s «unmittelbarkeit,» which aimed to overcome the boundaries of literature and to have a direct effect on politics, the end of the student movement is marked by the reintroduction of the subject into narrative (Briegleb 24). referred to as «neue Sensibilität,» «Betroffenheit,» or «Innerlichkeit,» these works aim at displaying «[die unmittelbare], persönlich [erlebte] Wahrheit» (Schlösser 392). The works included in this category are diverse, but many of them - including the ones Cornils contrasts to Özdamar’s novel - exhibit the disillusionment of the student protesters after 1968. These authors’ «aversion CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 427 11.11.14 17: 50 428 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu gegen das Begriffliche und politisch Verbindliche,» for example, is best displayed by Peter Schneider in his novel Lenz, in which the protagonist, who participates in a public reading of Mao’s ideas about the function of concepts, is distracted first by the physicality of the auditors and then by his own experiences and memories (Schlösser 392; P. Schneider 27-31). The debate on the «March 12 novels,» a term coined by Murat Belge in 1976, concerns the novels written after the military coup on 12 March 1971 against the leftists. zürcher claims that the number of arrests neared 5000 and that the military targeted and reportedly tortured many prominent leftists, including authors, academics and journalists (259). after the coup, the activists Deniz Gezmiş, Yusuf aslan and Hüseyin Inan were hanged. These executions are mentioned at the end of Özdamar’s novel. March 12 novels are the works that narrate the lives of the activists before and after the military intervention. Some of the notable works among many are Erdal Öz’s Yaralısın (You are Wounded, 1974), Sevgi Soysal’s Şafak (Dawn, 1975), Füruzan’s 47’liler (The Generation of ’47, 1974), Pınar Kür’s Yarın Yarın (Tomorrow Tomorrow, 1976) and adalet ağaoğlu’s Bir Düğün Gecesi (a Wedding night, 1979). 1 In addition to dealing with novels that were written during the same period, the literary debates in Germany and Turkey operate within the same conceptual framework, namely that of the expressionism debate of the 1930s among renowned theoreticians like lukács, Brecht and Bloch. It is in this exchange of ideas that we can detect movement once again: the Turkish literary public navigates towards Germany and gains mobility outside the confines of a «national culture» by reaching towards a past that is shared by both German and Turkish literary cultures alike. This mobility is certainly not confined to the Turkish archive. German literary culture reaches towards its past and discovers new possibilities too. One example is the fact that Brecht’s polemic against lukács, which provides important support for the documentary literature of the 1960s by pointing towards new models of realism that incorporate modernist techniques such as montage, was published for the first time in his Nachlass in 1966 (Schmitt 8). The polarity between subjectivity and objectivity of the work underlies the problems that occupy critics in both countries. In the periodization of novels through the category of distanciation and reflection looms large the figure of one literary critic, namely lukács, who prescribes a necessary detachment from sense experience for the novelist. already in 1966, Klaus Völker reintroduces the main problematic of the expressionism debate between lukács and Brecht to the readers of Kursbuch and highlights its relevance for his time. In 1975, Hans Christoph Buch declares in his article on the new Subjectivity that «es geht, wieder einmal, um den realismus» (14). lukács’s imprint CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 428 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 429 bridges not only the famous expressionism debate of the 1930s, debates on new Subjectivity in the 1970s, and literary renditions of 1968 in the 2000s, but also the debates in Turkey. This lukácsian critical perspective can be seen after the 1970s too. For example, Ingeborg Gerlach refers to lukács’s reflections on the literature of disillusionment after the failed revolution of 1848 to explain «den neuen Kult der Subjektivität» in what she terms «abschiedsliteratur» (9). The «cluelessness of the narrator,» «[die] unmittelbarkeit» of Karin Struck in the expression of her feelings, and «[die] gesellschaftliche atomisierung der Individuen» reflected in the new Subjectivity literature seem to repeat lukács’s condemnation of literary modernism (Gerlach 26). unmediated subjectivity that has severed all ties to an objective reality is a concern for Turkish critics as well. In 1976, Murat Belge initiates the discussion by accusing the aforementioned Turkish authors of not being able to comprehend their characters in their political lives - a requirement for lukácsian realism - but of focusing too much on their victimhood to the seemingly irrational wrath of the State («12 Mart» 123-29). adherence to lukácsian principles becomes more explicit in the 1990s, when Ömer Türkeş asserts that in these novels reality is replaced with emotions and that the real issues the workers in the 1960s were concerned about are ignored in favor of the patriotic and altruistic virtues of the protagonists (80-81). Medet Turan complains further that causality in the narrative is treated lightly (62). The heritage of lukácsian criticism, in which the dichotomy between subjectivity and objective reality plays a crucial role for the literary work, influences German literary critics who praise new Subjectivity too. Marcel reich-ranicki famously celebrates the return to storytelling in the 1970s with the belief that literature should focus on «[den] leidenden Menschen» who struggles against political institutions. He does not refrain from offering a historical explanation in a surprisingly lukácsian vein: Wahrscheinlich verbirgt sich hinter der Tendenz zum autobiographischen unter anderem auch die resignation der Schreibenden, nämlich die Einsicht in ihre nur beschränkten Möglichkeiten, die Gegenwart zu begreifen. […] Je dunkler, je unverständlicher die Welt, in der wir leben, desto mehr sieht man sich auf das nächstliegende verwiesen, auf einen eng umgrenzten Bezirk, womöglich auf das heimatliche Dorf. und je schwieriger, je komplizierter die Fragen, die uns bedrängen, desto häufiger zeigen die Schriftsteller die Welt am Beispiel einer einzigen Person - der eigenen. (27) What lukács condemns as «degenerate,» reich-ranicki embraces as the true calling of literature. a self-critical distance of the left towards itself is also already visible in some writings well before 1989, when critics such as Hazel E. Hazel, Michael Buselmeier, Volker Hage, Hermann Piwitt and Michael CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 429 11.11.14 17: 50 430 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu Schneider point out the necessity of addressing emotions in a literary work not only for the sake of aesthetics but also for the political agenda of a leftist culture. Schneider writes: Eine Bewegung, die unfähig ist, um ihre Opfer zu trauern, hat natürlich auch kein Talent zur Freude. Sie wird sich auch an ihren Erfolgen nicht begeistern können und sich so den Menschen kaum vernehmbar machen. […] Was der Intellektuellen- Bewegung vielmehr fehlte (bzw. schon früh wieder abgehanden gekommen ist), war eine radikale, mit politischem Inhalt gefüllte Bedürfnis- und Gefühlssprache. (178) at issue is then not only a return to aesthetics, but a reconsideration of the practices in the student movement itself. Inability to mourn the losses and the repression of feelings inevitably result in the return of the repressed, Schneider claims, which is most visible in the turn against Marxism itself, as well as in the fascination with a «Sprachlosigkeit» that he detects in certain novels. When subjectivity is not given its due, it is avenged at the expense of the movement’s conceptual heritage. It is in this framework that scholars like Sabine von Dirke can celebrate Struck’s Klassenliebe or Peter Schneider’s Lenz as a return to or a «rediscovery of the antiauthoritarian positions that dominated the beginnings of the student movement» (79). This is where the transnational exchange of concepts between Germany and Turkey comes to an end, for in the discussion of the March 12 novels, we do not see such an alternative. The lack of a positive approach in the Turkish context is a missed opportunity for the discussion of the representability of torture. This option signals a way to break the silence of solemnity that surrounds violence. One possible explanation for this difference is that, contrary to the case in Germany, literature has never been announced dead à la Enzensberger in Turkey, and documentary literature has never been considered a viable option for class struggle. The renowned Turkish literary critic Berna Moran even argues that the March 12 novels are too sociological, and hence not literary enough (17). What he has in mind is, however, not the genres that emphasize the effect of the work on the audience. rather, for Moran and others, the problem is the incongruity between the richness of personal experiences narrated by the authors and the poverty of the political experiences that are not represented truthfully by the authors partly due to their own ignorance of the activists’ lives. Once schematically constructed memories are imputed to the characters, realism, the critics believe, is tainted by falsity. One such example is Pınar Kür’s first novel Yarın Yarın. It tells the lives of several characters from different walks of life, but the story centers on the love between Selim, a young revolutionary who comes back to Turkey after having studied in Paris like the author herself (who lived in Paris and new York), and CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 430 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 431 Şeyda, the wife of a wealthy industrialist. at one point in the novel Selim tells his friends in Turkey about his experiences of May 68 during his stay in Paris, which is a rare instance of transnational exchange in the March 12 novels. His insistence on the fact that he has witnessed police brutality with his very own eyes adds credibility to his account, while his resentment that he could not tell his friends about his own personal journey from being a petit-bourgeois to a revolutionary on the streets of Paris reveals the tension between the personal and the collective. For the Turkish critics, the problem is the superficiality in the representation of the latter. an author who has not participated in the protests herself does not have the knowledge of the totality. Where there is an assertion that one has witnessed the events himself, false authenticity casts its shadow on the ingenuity of descriptions of personal lives as well. This is especially true for Selim’s character, for the role he plays at the end of the novel as one of the leaders of a political group that robs a bank in Turkey places him too much at the center of political history, thereby making a perfect representation nearly impossible. We could compare this to Özdamar, who, surprisingly, always situates the narrator as a bystander vis-à-vis historical events. The narrator learns about the protests, the clashes with the police, Ohnesorg’s death, and the hanging of Deniz Gezmiş and his friends either through friends or through newspapers. One exception is the well known protests against the 6 th flotilla in Turkey, which the narrator witnesses not as a participant, but as an observer traveling on the ship, the very symbol of mobility that we have seen earlier. The interplay between mediation and immediacy in this choice of positioning is interesting. While the accounts given are mediated through reports, they do not pose the problem of false attribution. Decentering the narrator in the face of history, however, bestows onto the narrative (particularly the parts concerning the events in Turkey) a facet that cannot be found in the Turkish novels depicting the same period: history is treated not through subjective experiences, but through the documentary. What is missing in the Turkish debate is introduced in a narrative, not as a threat to storytelling, but as a complement to the personal experiences of the author. This solution is certainly not what lukács would have envisioned. a total disjunction of the personal from the social would result for lukács in the reduction of reality to sense perceptions and to montage. But it is the very «splitting» and hybridity of forms and the dislocation of history and personal life that enable the author to do justice to both. Özdamar offers a Brechtian solution to a problem posed by Turkish critics by reevaluating it in the context of the German debate. The use of the documentary form, however, is not enough to do justice to personal experiences. While their lukácsian perspective forecloses the pos- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 431 11.11.14 17: 50 432 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu sibility of considering the work as performative rather than representative, Turkish critics still discuss how tales of torture and violence can be incorporated into literature. Murat Belge argues that the March 12 novels derive their emotional power from their elegiac quality («Bir Edebiyat» 150). But the lukácsian emphasis on distinguishable intellectual physiognomies for the characters in a narrative forces him to criticize the communal nature of elegy and mourning. as a traditional genre, elegy, Belge claims, falls short of responding to the problems after the student protests, since it cannot provide a ground for self-criticism. I would argue, however, that far from providing a communal mourning for the losses, the March 12 novels offer highly individualistic and isolated views of the predicament of student activists. Both the authors and the critics share the same subject-oriented outlook on the role of fiction. The two authors who had actual experiences, Sevgi Soysal and Erdal Öz, exemplify this trend well. Soysal, who is also the author of the novels Yürümek (To Walk, 1970) and Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti (High noon in Yenişehir, 1974), was arrested and spent more than two months in prison for her political involvement. Similarly, Öz was arrested after the coup d’état. Both authors dedicate their oeuvres to the sufferings and disappointments of the 68-generation; their personal experiences give credibility to the subject matter of their novels. While Soysal’s novel Şafak describes the interrogation of Oya, a revolutionary activist who has recently been released from prison but is taken into custody under suspicion of her continuing her secret operations, Öz’s Yaralısın tells the story of nuri, who is imprisoned after having been tortured during his interrogation. The psychological state of the protagonists mostly revolves around feelings of guilt, suspicion of others, disillusionment, and exhaustion. as in the literature of the new Subjectivity mentioned above, the inability to communicate with common people gives rise to self-accusations due to one’s middle class aspirations. Here, absolute detachment does not stem from mobility, but its opposite, since the characters are confined to prison. Communication is not entirely absent, but is hampered by obstacles. In the narratives of Sevgi Soysal and Erdal Öz, characters constantly try to understand what the other is thinking or feeling, and the prison functions as a gateway to knowing the stories of common people, whom the narrators do not encounter in their daily lives. The prison is also a place for remembering and for the most part, the novels are comprised of these stories of the past. In Özdamar, however, subjectivity is not closed in on itself. Communication with other people does not become an existential problem. This is best exemplified in one passage in which Özdamar shortly mentions the life stories of several inhabitants of the «Wonaymsalon» without dwelling on any detail (30-31). In contrast, life stories of the inmates comprise most of CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 432 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 433 Yaralısın and Şafak. Instead of intersubjectivity, what matters in Özdamar’s narrative is the communal. She describes the experience of the Turkish workers as follows: «Jedes ‹Ich› nähte sich an das nächste ‹Ich› und machte ein ‹Wir›» (46). as Kader Konuk reminds us, the communal in Özdamar is established through mimicry, in which there is no origin, but only «Varianten» (96). The internal divisions of «Kinder,» «zucker,» «Esel» and «Huren» in the dormitory and their subsequent intermingling and elimination testify to the continuous procedures of community formation (Özdamar 43). The narrator is only one of the many characters whose daily lives alternate between detachments and reattachments in which an essential core of subjectivity is not sought. It is important to note that this category of the communal is also effective in the use of the hen metaphor, which the narrator first hears on the radio and then uses to describe the transnational experience of the communists in Berlin (159). By referring to Turkish, Greek and German communists as «Hühner,» Özdamar establishes transnational connections not through personal experiences and sufferings, through a face-to-face dialogue about the past, or through lukácsian representation of the historical context of events in their totality, but through words. She thereby creates a commune out of people from various nationalities and carries one national struggle to the other with the help of a metaphor. Mimicry in the March 12-novels, on the other hand, is generally denigrated for its use of lies: in Kür’s novel, for example, aysel, the woman Seyla’s husband has an affair with, derives her strength from her ability to adjust herself to each and every situation. Yet, in her inner monologues, she accuses herself of inauthenticity, in a vein very much like that of the characters of Yaralısın and Şafak. Being an autonomous subject signifies detachment for Kür. But this detachment from immediate surroundings, unlike that of the diasporic identity, does not go through reattachments and enter into new relations; it is immobile. Due to this isolated subjectivity and its drive to go outside, I would argue that the March 12 novels cannot be read as eulogies, in which one mourns for the loss of another, but rather as stories of willful de-individualization, in which the protagonist strips himself or herself of his or her class through the radical passivity of being tortured in order to become one among the many, most notably symbolized by the protagonist of Yaralısın, who at the end names himself «nuri» like everyone else in the prison. In other words, the limiting subjectivity of the narrator is overcome only through the dissolution of the self by this horrid exposure to violence. To use the well-known distinction of Freud, the narrators’ self-accusations, feelings of guilt and drive towards annihilating their own identity suggest a melancholic attitude rather than one of mourning (244). In Özdamar, on the other hand, this dissolution CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 433 11.11.14 17: 50 434 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu is not an issue. While the characters in Kür, Soysal and Öz do not know the stories, feelings and thoughts of other characters, but claim to know where they stand in history, for Özdamar’s narrator, communal experience is no mystery. But history, which is represented as a heap of reports coming from all over the world, is untotalizable and hence mysterious. as such, neither expressions of personal feelings, nor a realistic analysis of characters can sufficiently express the horror in the face of history itself. The lukácsian conceptual framework of subjectivity versus objective reality that is so important for both debates, then, cannot resolve the problem of reworking past traumas, since it relies on representation. Only absolute detachment seems to be the way out. reversing azade Seyhan’s argument that «archaic, forgotten, and modern signifying practices, such as homilies, litanies, ancient curses and politicians’ promises» serve as the «linguistic remembrance» of the home country (144), Yasemin Yıldız suggests that these practices «can also function to liberate from and challenge the mother tongue» (21). as opposed to a melancholic de-individualization, mourning can be interpreted as a liberating practice. It is only with a collective eulogy through the voices of mothers that Özdamar can express her grief for the losses of the student movement (326). When Benno Ohnesorg dies, he turns back into a human being from being a hen, and when Deniz Gezmiş dies, «Der Mensch geht» (326). What connects the two parts of the novel is this double loss: Once someone is lost, the narrator leaves one country to go to the other. Transnationalism through mourning for the losses mobilizes the narrator not only through the metaphor, but also through its elimination in becoming too real. as such, this reality does not signify silence or a halt. The passage from figures of speech to reality is a detachment as well, after which the author reattaches to new metaphors and to new «inventions,» just as the narrator departs from one place to go to the next. Thus, mourning goes beyond representation and opens up to performance. When Michael Schneider highlights the necessity of mourning for the left, the way in which this can be done in literature remains a question mark, since what is to be mourned is a collective loss, while the protagonists they have in mind are «subjects.» Just as Özdamar transforms the problem of history’s representation raised by Belge by reconsidering it within the context of the German debate, Özdamar carries the problem of mourning raised by German critics in reverse direction to give it a new meaning in the Turkish context of communal eulogy. The process of mourning is freed from the representational restraints of subjective and personal storytelling by being reinterpreted as a performance, an operation that the German critics consider a remnant of 1968’s experimentalism. But this connection is established only through CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 434 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 435 the concept of eulogy that is suggested and underestimated by the Turkish literary culture. The juxtaposition of the two national archives, then, can be seen like the two parts of Özdamar’s novel. By traversing them in both directions, Özdamar’s novel participates in their communication, a communication which preceded her. Notes 1 none of the Turkish novels and articles mentioned in this article are translated into English. The translations of their titles here and in the rest of the article are mine. Works Cited adelson, leslie a. «Back to the Future: Turkish remembrances of the GDr and Other Phantom Pasts.» The Cultural After-Life of East Germany: New Transnational Perspectives. Ed. leslie a. adelson. Washington. D.C.: american Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2002. 93-110. -. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature. new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ağaoğlu, adalet. Bir Düğün Gecesi. i̇stanbul: Türkiye i̇ş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2006. Belge, Murat. «12 Mart romanlarına Genel Bir Bakış.» Edebiyat Üstüne Yazılar. i̇stanbul: i̇letişim, 2012. 115-40. -. «Bir Edebiyat Malzemesi Olarak 12 Mart Yaşantısı.» Edebiyat Üstüne Yazılar. i̇stanbul: i̇letişim, 2012. 141-50. Boa, Elizabeth. «Özdamar’s autobiographical Fictions: Trans-national Identity and literary Form.» German Life and Letters 59.4 (2006): 526-38. Briegleb, Klaus and Keith Bullivant. «Die Krise des Erzählens - 1968 und danach.» Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968. Ed. Klaus Briegleb and Sigrid Weigel. Munich: Hanser, 1992. 304-40. Briegleb, Klaus. «literatur in der revolte - revolte in der literatur.» Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968. Ed. Klaus Briegleb and Sigrid Weigel. Munich: Hanser, 1992. 19-73. Buch, Hans Christoph. «Vorbericht.» Die Literatur nach dem Tod der Literatur. Ed. Hans Christoph Buch. Hamburg: rowohlt, 1975. 11-19. Buselmeier, Michael. «nach der revolte. Die literarische Verarbeitung der Studentenbewegung». Literatur und Studentenbewegung: Eine Zwischenbilanz. Ed. Martin lüdke. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1977. 124-58. Cornils, Ingo. «Joined at the Hip? The representation of the German Student Movement and left-Wing Terrorism in recent literature.» Baader-Meinhof Returns: Historical and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism. Ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils. amsterdam: rodopi, 2008. 137-57. -. «long Memories: The German Student Movement in recent Fiction.» German Life and Letters 56.1 (2003): 89-101. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 435 11.11.14 17: 50 436 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu Dirke, Sabine von. All Power to the Imagination: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens. lincoln, nE: u of nebraska P, 1997. Füruzan. 47’liler. ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1974. Freud, Sigmund. «Mourning and Melancholia.» The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. 14. london: Hogarth, 1957. 243-58. Gerlach, Ingeborg. Abschied von der Revolte. Würzburg: Königshausen & neumann, 1994. Hage, Volker. Die Wiederkehr des Erzählers: Neue deutsche Literatur der siebziger Jahre. Frankfurt a.M.: ullstein, 1982. Hazel, Hazel E. «Die alte und die neue Sensibilität. Erfahrungen mit dem Subjekt, das zwischen die Kulturen gefallen ist.» Die Literatur nach dem Tod der Literatur. Ed. Hans Christoph Buch. Hamburg: rowohlt, 1975. 129-45. Huyssen, andreas. «Diaspora and nation: Migration into Other Pasts.» New German Critique 88 (2003): 141-64. Kaputanoğlu, anil. Hinfahren und Zurückdenken: Zur Konstruktion kultureller Zwischenräume in der türkisch-deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur. Würzburg: Königshausen & neumann, 2010. Koenen, Gerd. «armed Innocence, or Hitler’s Children revisited.» Baader-Meinhof Returns: Historical and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism. Ed. Gerrit- Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils. amsterdam: rodopi, 2008. 23-41. Konuk, Kader. Identitäten im Prozeß: Literatur von Autorinnen aus und in der Türkei in deutscher, englischer und türkischer Sprache. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2001. Kür, Pınar. Yarın Yarın. i̇stanbul: Can Yayınları, 1987. Mani, B. Venkat. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. Iowa City: u of Iowa P, 2007. -. «The Good Woman of Istanbul: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn.» Gegenwartsliteratur 2 (2003): 29-58. Moran, Berna. Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış 3. Sevgi Soysal’dan Bilge Karasu’ya. Istanbul: i̇letişim Yayınları, 2001. Öz, Erdal. Yaralısın. i̇stanbul: Can Yayınları, 1992. Özdamar, Emine Sevgi. Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008. Piwitt, Hermann Peter. «rückblick auf heisse Tage. Die Studentenrevolte in der literatur.» Die Literatur nach dem Tod der Literatur. Ed. Hans Christoph Buch. Hamburg: rowohlt, 1975. 35-47. reich-ranicki, Marcel. Entgegnung: Zur deutschen Literatur der siebziger Jahre. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-anstalt, 1979. rinner, Susanne. The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination. new York: Berghahn, 2013. Schlichting, Hans Burkhard. «Das ungenügen der poetischen Strategien: literatur im ‹Kursbuch› 1968-1976.» Literatur und Studentenbewegung: Eine Zwischenbilanz. Ed. Martin lüdke. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1977. 33-64. Schlösser, Hermann. «literaturgeschichte und Theorie in der literatur.» Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968. Ed. Klaus Briegleb and Sigrid Weigel. Munich: Hanser, 1992. 385-404. Schmitt, Hans-Jürgen. «Einleitung.» Die Expressionismusdebatte. Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Schmitt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973. 7-27. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 436 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 437 Schneider, Michael. «Von der alten radikalität zur neuen Sensibilität.» Kursbuch 49 (1977): 174-87. Schneider, Peter. Lenz. Berlin: rotbuch Verlag, 1988. Seyhan, azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton, nJ: Princeton uP, 2001. Shafi, Monika. «Talkin’ ’bout My Generation: Memories of 1968 in recent German novels.» German Life and Letters 59.2 (2006): 201-16. Soysal, Sevgi. Şafak. i̇stanbul: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1975. Struck, Karin. Klassenliebe: Roman. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973. Tek, Hayati. Darbeler ve Türk Basını. Vol. 1. ankara: atılım Yayınları, 2003. Timm, uwe. Heisser Sommer. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974. Türkeş, Ömer. «romanda 12 Mart Suretleri ve ’68 Kuşağı.» Birikim 132 (2000): 80-85. Turan, Medet. Türk Romanında 12 Mart. i̇stanbul: Dönence, 2009. Völker, Klaus. «Brecht und lukács. analyse einer Meinungsverschiedenheit.» Kursbuch 7 (1966): 80-102. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. new York: Fordham uP, 2012. zürcher, Erik J. Turkey: A Modern History. new York: Tauris & Co., 2004. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 437 11.11.14 17: 50 Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media: Bandista Ela GEzEn university of Massachusetts, amherst From a world with no borders, no nations and no exiles; we hear dozens of voices echoing from the past, the future, and the present, all together we shout out; we were, we are and we shall be! Forever! (Bandista) Bandista, a self-described music collective, was founded in Istanbul in 2006. Through framing texts provided on their website - in Turkish, English, Spanish and German - the band proposes to sing for a world without borders and classes, characterizing their political orientation and musical approach as «internationalist» (Bandista). Their internationalist scope is further emphasized through the variety of genres incorporated in their music, ranging from reggae and Ska to Dub and afro-Beat. Their songs are politically motivated, and address universal issues of exile, deportation, and human rights violations as can be evidenced, for example, on their most recent album, sınırsız-ulussuz-sürgünsüz (no borderno nation-no exile, 2012). The third song on this album focuses specifically on integration and discrimination of guest workers and immigrants in Germany, while at the same time opening up an international horizon. Furthermore, in choosing the Internet as their sole medium for distribution, Bandista proclaim themselves free from capitalist marketing strategies. While the music industry tends to vilify online piracy, Bandista promote uses of the Internet as a common ground of collaboration and exchange, as well as distribution on their own terms. Through their practice of copyleft and invitation to download and share their music, Bandista abandon the music industry’s monetization of content distribution, and instead mobilize transnationally-oriented Marxist categories. Examining their latest album’s lyrics, musical genres, distribution mechanisms, and attendant web design and meta-commentary, this paper argues that Bandista’s emphasis on digital presentation situates their music at the nexus of politics, aesthetics and class struggle in ways which Marx could not have foreseen, all while mobilizing pre-digital categories of struggle and resistance. Foregrounding lyrics alongside political language, visual iconography, and discussions of access and distribution, Bandista insist on the inextricabil- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 438 11.11.14 17: 50 Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media 439 ity of the (multi)medium and the message, opening new avenues for musical protest. Bandista perceive themselves as a «revolutionary band» [eylem bandosu] and conceptualized their first album de te fabula narratur (May 2009) as their manifesto (Yaşar). The album title, taken from Karl Marx’s introduction to Das Kapital (1867), translates into «the story applies to you,» and serves as the motto for the albums to follow. On their album cover text, they cite the passage from Marx’s text in German, as well as in Turkish translation: […] Sollte jedoch der deutsche leser pharisäisch die achseln zucken über die zustände der englischen Industrie und ackerbauarbeiter, oder sich optimistisch dabei beruhigen, dass in Deutschland die Sachen noch lange nicht so schlimm stehn, so muss ich ihm zurufen: De te fabula narratur! […] ama eğer alman okur, i̇ngiliz sanayi ve tarım işçilerinin durumuna omuz silker, ya da iyimser bir biçimde almanya’da işlerin bu kadar kötü olmadığı düşüncesiyle kendini avutursa, ona açıkça şunu söylemeliyim: De te fabula narratur! (Bandista) By quoting Marx in this way, on the one hand Bandista’s cover text addresses and includes the listener by establishing their music as universal and implicating the reader-listener in the fabula of its contention; on the other hand, it clearly situates their music in the context of working class struggle and Marxist politics, urging (with Marx) the forging of an alliance between the working class and others. This not only manifests itself in the intertextual reference to Marx in the title and liner notes, but it is also exemplified through the release date of their first album: May 1 st , 2009. Bandista follow the leftist tradition in Turkey to publish first releases on May 1 st , further referencing the international labor movement by remixing international songs of working class struggle such as, for example, «haydi barikata» (To the Barricades). Furthermore, in an interview with Heide Demmel, Bandista emphasize that this date was particularly chosen to avoid «misunderstandings and emphasize the political orientation.» In addition to releasing their debut album through their website on May 1 st , 2009, the band members distributed 1000 copies for free at Taksim Square. Taksim Square has long been a landmark in the history of political protest in Turkey, occupying this position well before the ongoing Gezi protests that began in 2013. On February 16, 1969, approximately 30,000 leftists marched towards Taksim in an anti-imperialist mass protest, which was violently suppressed by extreme right-wing groups and has been since referred to as «Bloody Sunday» [Kanlı Pazar] (Gökay 93). Eight years later the revolutionary confederation of labor unions, Di̇SK (Türkiye Devrimci i̇şçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu), organized a rally to take place on May 1 st , 1977 on Taksim Square. Towards the end of the rally, shots were fired CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 439 11.11.14 17: 50 440 Ela Gezen into the crowd, which in tandem with actions by the riot police, led to mass panic. This resulted in the death of over 30 left-wing demonstrators, an event commemorated as «Bloody 1 st May» [Kanlı 1 Mayıs] (ahmad 169; Gökay 108; Koç 347-367). 1 The political ambition of Bandista’s first album is thus articulated on various registers: album title, content, distribution and release date. Music, Bandista claim, is a tool for resistance and a mouthpiece in service of their anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, and anti-militarist stance (Demmel). The remixing, and/ or covering of existing songs is constant throughout Bandista’s œuvre, leading to a process they described to Özcan and Çakır as the practice of «ripping, tracing, deforming contents, musical and textual, perceiving them as their contribution to their present, their lived history, which in turn is exposed to transformation.» In their self-perception as «tayfa» [crew, collective] whose members remain anonymous, the emphasis, as the above quote illustrates, is put on the collective as well as collaboration, moving away from the «capitalist exaltation of the individual,» foregrounding the interaction and communication between individuals, while understanding history as collectively constructed with the legacy of their productions (Özcan and Çakır). In the same vein, Bandista perceive what they produce as belonging to the collective, not the individual; it is therefore available to all. Moreover, Bandista reject the notion of conservation [«muhafaza»] with regards to the work of art. revolutionary art, they claim, should not and cannot be fetishized but should rather be distributed and remixed by the people, so that new bandistas and new art can emerge therefrom (Özcan and Çakır). Therefore, their music has to be plainly «doable» in what they describe as a punk sense, so that others can play it or simplify it in order for it to be spread. They put it as follows: «we do not have a punk style, but we have a punk attitude» [«Punk tarzımız yok punk tavrımız var»] (Özcan and Çakır). This further manifests itself in their practices of DIY (Do It Yourself), which I address in some detail below. Bandista have repeatedly expressed their support in the fight against discrimination (Demmel). Their latest album, sınırsız-ulussuz-sürgünsüz (no border-no nation-no exile), as the title already indicates, invokes the condition of exile, emigration, and forced migration. again, as with the other albums, the release date of this album was purposefully scheduled to reflect on a historic date of political significance: the 50 th anniversary of the bilateral labor recruitment agreement between Turkey and Germany. Therefore, Bandista included a song titled «kim yerli kim göçmen» [who is a local, who is a migrant] focusing on Turkish immigrants in Germany. This song samples and reinterprets Cem Karaca’s song «Es kamen Menschen,» which was featured CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 440 11.11.14 17: 50 Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media 441 on his album Die Kanaken (1984), with Turkish immigrants in Germany as its thematic focus. Cem Karaca was a well-known Turkish rock singer, who, having left Turkey in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, lived in political exile in Germany. not only was Die Kanaken his only album released in German, it is also the first album by a Turkish musician to be recorded with a German label (Pläne, in Dortmund). The majority of songs on this album were included in the anti-discrimination play Ab in den Orientexpress (1984), which to this day is still being performed on German stages. The album was produced in the aftermath of the recruitment ban (1973), when West Germany limited immigration, encouraged the return of foreigners, and restricted social integration. an increasing unemployment rate and the competition for jobs raised doubts regarding the economic gain derived from guest workers (Herbert 222). The so-called Gastarbeiterproblem, which had entered the public discussion during the recession, turned into the Türkenproblem. During Helmut Kohl’s term of office, public criticism against labor migrants and immigrants climaxed. In his first television appearance after his election to office, Kohl stated that the numbers of foreigners («ausländer»), and particularly Turks, was too high and needed to be reduced (lüderwaldt 107). For subsequent political proceedings, the main premise was that Germany had never been, and would never be, a country of immigration, something that had already been proposed by Kohl’s predecessor Helmut Schmidt in 1979 (Meier-Braun 78). To understand how Bandista reflect on this period in Turkish-German history, a close examination of their re-interpretation of Cem Karaca’s song is in order. The chorus in both Bandista’s and Karaca’s song is based on Max Frisch’s well-known quote «Man hat arbeitskräfte gerufen und es kamen Menschen.» already in 1965, Frisch pointed toward the permanent settlement of guest workers who had initially been perceived as a temporary phenomenon serving the economic miracle. Bandista base part of the lyrics of their cover on the Turkish-language version of Karaca’s song, but also include their own lyrics in order to update the song to represent their political position. In their digital liner notes and in an interview with the German radio station Radio Z, Nuremberg, Bandista emphasize that this song serves as a means to document a historical moment, while at the same time adapting it to the present and exposing social issues such as discrimination and racism as universal. as part of the lyrics, they interpolate a quote by rosa luxemburg, «Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein,» from «Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin» (1919), the last text she wrote prior to her assassination (209). underlining the unavoidability of revolution, rosa luxemburg was herself quoting Hermann Ferdinand Freiligrath, who in his poem «Die revolution» (1851) represented CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 441 11.11.14 17: 50 442 Ela Gezen revolution as a recurrence throughout history. Through the reference to rosa luxemburg, Bandista establish a connection between the struggle of Turkish immigrants, and the ideological stance not just of Marxist internationalism in the present, but of nationally-bounded German radicalism going all the way back to Marx himself. accordingly, their identification is not just political, but genealogical as well. Thus in their documentation and denunciation of labor exploitation, undocumented immigration, racism, and discrimination as continuing pressing issues, Bandista draw on earlier traditions of the labor movement. The intertextual reference to rosa luxemburg is introduced by referring to her as «rosa comrade» [«rosa yoldaş»], and through this demonstration of solidarity, Bandista close ranks with proletarian Internationalism, the labor movement, and Marxism as represented by luxemburg and the Second International. In addition to establishing the condition of exile as universal, and addressing the German context as a case study, Bandista also draw attention to Turkey’s problematic status as a host country, rather than country of origin; their release date also commemorates the death of nigerian refugee Festus Okey, who was killed on august 20 th , 2007 in Istanbul while in police custody. In their digital liner notes, they comment Festus was neither the first victim of state violence, nor the last immigrant-left to die or killed [sic] at-the borders, out-in-the sea, in the middle of-the-cities, in state institutions or left to die-in-the hands of civilian fascists. Everyone is-a local, everyone is-a migrant. nobody-flees-without a reason.-The reason might be-war, exile, ecological and economic crisis, pogrom or genocide, discrimination or a desire to live a better life nation-state borders, walls, barbed wires, private-security-forces, death threats, do not, cannot and should not stop the wave of-migrants-whose only motive is to survive. (Bandista) While addressing specific cases, they stress that it is important to understand these as non-nation specific, universal matters of concern to all. In an interview with the Turkish daily newspaper Hürriyet, Bandista again draw the analogy to the German context «Whatever Solingen is, Festus Okey is just that» [«Solingen neyse, Festus Okey De o»] (Dağlar). Two elements of Bandista’s argument are important to mention here. First, there is no national specificity to these crimes. Therefore, Bandista emphasize, they must be perceived as discriminatory practices and human rights violations of universal concern. Second, neither the nationality of the victim, nor the legal status in any given national context, can serve as a basis to justify these crimes or how they are handled in individual judicial systems (Dağlar). By demanding a similar public response to Okey’s death, as occurred in response to the Solingen arson attacks, Bandista not only chose the fifth anniversary of his death as the CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 442 11.11.14 17: 50 Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media 443 release date for the album, but also dedicate the second song «hiç kimsenin şarkısı» [nobody’s song] to him, which they constitute as «scream» [«çığlık»]. On the album, Bandista provide brief commentaries following each song’s lyrics. For the song dedicated to Okey, they argue the following: In fact, it was not that different from all the other murders we had witnessed for years. again a cog in the wheels of state power, again with hate, again with discrimination, again by ignoring all human values, wiped out a life. It transpires that this time the victim «deserved to die» because he was not a citizen but a refugee, and on top of it, because of the difference of his skin color; just like those who «deserve to be killed» for being a woman, Kurdish, gay, armenian, transgender, roma, rebellious, all of those who are «nobodies.» 2 (Bandista) The first song on the album «haymatlos» [stateless] expresses their «longing for a borderless world» [«sınırsız bir dünyaya özlem»] addressing issues of exile, deportation, and asylum in general. By contrast, the second and third songs on this album are dedicated to specific cases in both the Turkish and German context, while simultaneously deconstructing these as nationally specific circumstances as well as establishing discrimination based on social, ethnic, racial, religious, and national categories of difference as universal concerns. This manifests itself in the second song, in which, while commemorating Okey’s death, they sing «we are all local, we are all migrants, we are here my friend, it’s enough, my friend» [«hep yerliyiz hep göçmen, buradayız kardeşim artık yeter»]. Solidarity is expressed through the band’s inclusion of itself in the communal «we,» as well as through the choice of the title. In calling it «nobody’s song» while dedicating it to Okey’s murder, Bandista emphasize it as common property, it belongs to nobody in particular, and therefore becomes everybody’s song. The collaborative and communicative aspect of Bandista’s music is foregrounded by the multilingualism of their liner notes, songs, and website content. Their multimedial texts are polyglot, and include Turkish, German, English, Spanish, French as well as lingala. The universality of human rights violations, labor exploitation, and social discrimination is communicated and highlighted through the multilingual dimension of their texts. English is decentralized as the dominant language of the music industry, which extends the scope of their conversation through the inclusion of non-Western languages as well. Their collaborations and communication with artists in various locations, emphasizes the transnational aspect of their scope further. In their aim to document the past, they consider the visual, the performative, and the sonic to be equally important in bringing their message across (Dağlar). Their leftist influences with regards to class struggle are clearly identified, and discussed on their website, which is colored red-and-black and CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 443 11.11.14 17: 50 444 Ela Gezen framed by images of the red star, and hammer and sickle, thus attesting to the extension of their self-performance as Communists into the theater of digital space. The five point red star of communism is adorned with piano keys resembling a bandoleer, emphasizing the understanding of music as weapon. Beyond extending the thematics of revolution into electronic space, and commenting on each individual song, the website offers a textual commentary on each album, providing a political framework within which each album can be interpreted. For sınırsız-ulussuz-sürgünsüz, they offer the following paratext: anti-immigrant sentiments find their expressions in and through the actions and policies of the state as well as in daily life, in civilian fascist attacks, in professional associations of various sectors or in the discriminatory violence of precarious-workers. against this, we should-strive-to make immigration movement immanent to class struggle and anti-fascist/ anti-nationalist movement-remembering-that the world of dissent and resistance gain [sic] its power from our international and collective struggle. (Bandista) Solidarity is the central component of their struggle, and music is the means to support it. This finds further expression in their understanding of concerts as «meetings» and «actionz» and of listeners and concertgoers as «participants,» «friends» and «family» (Mehrabov 85; interview with Yaşar). The collaborative nature is also emphasized by the anonymity of Bandista’s members on the album, in interviews and line-ups. no individual member is mentioned by name and singled out. In their anti-capitalist stance, they are opposed to stardom and star culture. The communal aspect is further enacted in the distribution methods of their music through the practice of copyleft, a «communal system of ownership» (Berry 137) 3 . The music industry has undoubtedly changed through the advent of the Internet. But while the Internet has been associated with pirating and file sharing, with Bandista we encounter a subversive use of the Internet as a means of collaboration, exchange, as well as of distribution on their own terms. Their practice of copyleft and invitation to download, copy, and distribute their music stand in direct opposition to common practices in the music industry. Furthermore, it is considered «a return to the earliest ideas of intellectual property,» embodying «three traditional principles that governed intellectual property before the industrial revolution when intellectual property was still considered common good» (Friedman 96). These principles basically refer to the conceptualization of knowledge as «build[ing] on prior knowledge» and «requir[ing] the support of tradition,» as non-proprietary, and as growing through its circulation as common property (Friedman 96). Finally, «[t]he philosophical position of copyleft is that communities have rights in knowl- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 444 11.11.14 17: 50 Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media 445 edge along with individuals. Moreover copyleft asserts that copyright is often used against individuals by a legal system that favors powerful interests over individual creators» (Friedman 96-97). In that sense, knowledge can only be owned by sharing, which contradicts the conception of knowledge as private property (Friedman 96-97). The band perceives the practice of copyleft as a political statement that embodies not only their understanding of music as common good, but also their conception of the audience as participants and contributors (Demmel). These practices, together with sampling and re-recording well-known political protest songs, constitute an anti-capitalist approach to the circulation of knowledge inclusive of tradition. aware of how even counter-cultural products have been affected and absorbed by capitalism, Bandista see copyleft as instrumental to fighting the industry’s common practices and the commodification of culture. The production and circulation of knowledge central to Bandista’s music, realized through copyleft licensing, draws upon the Marxist understanding that everything produced - material and intellectual - is not private property but collectively owned. Bandista not only take matters of distribution into their own hands, they also advocate and engage in the DIY (Do It Yourself) process (Mehrabov 85). They thereby cut out «a set of intermediaries that act upon and channel the music from producers to consumers. These intermediaries include producers and engineers, artists and repertoire (a&r) specialists, marketing and media experts, and so on» (leyshon et al. 190). Furthermore, Bandista proclaim their independence from the exploitation of the music industry by producing and distributing their music themselves. In a Marxist sense, they take back control over means of production «by engaging in DIY processes, by learning the sound technologies and their engineering, recording and producing the music on one’s own» (Mehrabov 86). While their first album was produced in a studio in Italy, with the band very much involved in the process, the second album was mastered at different places with «a sound card and a laptop» (qtd. in Mehrabov 85) which further exemplifies their artistic and economic independence. Moreover, by making their albums available with framing texts and without attaching it to individual personalities, they decoupled the production of music from the production of star personalities. On all their musical releases Bandista is presented as Oppa tZupa zound Zystem «hareketi» [movement] or «hamle» [move] (Bandista). Bandista are part of the label Oppa tZupa zound Zystem (Opzzz! ) which perceives itself as a «collective musical, textual, visual, political, unionist platform for action and solidarity,» thus continuing in the steps of the original anti-industry stance of Jamaican sound systems, with the inclusion, in addition to Bandista, of bands like ahibba, Deli, Enzo Ikah Band, Fitisound, Hariçten Gazelciler and Viya who CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 445 11.11.14 17: 50 446 Ela Gezen came together and formed this ‹zystem› in order to develop musical sharing, to encourage collective trans-genre production and action, to create staging and acting possibilities, to hinder unjust treatment in the commercial relationships with the third persons and during the festivals, spaces, and works that are involved by way of agreements and collective bargaining and to create a counter-cultural space outside of the existing forms of the system. (Opzzz) The emphasis is again put on the collective and collaborative aspect of music making, as a means of self-representation and production outside of the exploitative practices of the entertainment industry. The label «tries to build a collective life with its two studios, one office, regular meetings, booking, working groups on graphic and law, and an inner economy» (Opzzz). The creative and economic domain is intertwined in the collective, which takes the means of production, distribution, labeling and performance into its own hands. The members of Opzzz! further emphasize that Within the entertainment industry as a one big market system based on popularization, packaging, labeling, economical, emotional or genre-wise exploitation under different names such as music, culture or art, Opzzz! is concerned with creating alternatives with guerilla tactics and form its own agenda. It has the principle of establishing solidarity and producing together with the artistic, political, trans-genre, and vital actions, organizations, individuals and invitations which work for the same causes. (Opzzz) Solidarity, in addition to collaboration, becomes the hallmark of music making, production and distribution - activities that feed into one another, and which Opzzz! situate at the nexus of politics and aesthetics. Bandista actively intervene in the production process, which as Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay «Der autor als Produzent» (1934), is key in the artist’s declaration of solidarity with the proletariat, as well as providing the basis for social change. Since «gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse» are conditioned by «Produktivverhältnisse,» Benjamin, in his discussion of operative, revolutionary art, shifts the focus from the question of the relationship between a work of art and its connection to production relations, to its position within them (222). He discusses Brecht’s practice of «umfunktionierung,» which according to Benjamin, describes «die Veränderung von Produktionsformen und Produktionsinstrumenten im Sinne einer fortschrittlichen - daher an der Befreiung der Produktionsmittel interessierten, daher im Klassenkampf dienlichen - Intelligenz» (104). Brecht’s epic theater is presented by Benjamin as a prime model for the intervention into and transformation of production processes, insofar as it reorganizes the relationship between producer and audience (spectators, listeners, readers), turning readers and/ or spectators into collaborators, «Mitwirkende» (110). Brecht, like Benjamin, stressed CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 446 11.11.14 17: 50 Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media 447 the necessity of changing the relationship between producer and audience; he sought to transform the radio from a «Distributionsapparat» to a «Kommunikationsapparat des öffentlichen lebens» (147). In «Der rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat» (1932), Brecht further emphasizes (as he does with music and theater as well), that radio should not merely have a «dekorative Haltung,» but rather a social significance based on an active exchange with the listeners (148-49). This transformation of the radio adds the dimension to receive beyond one-directional, static transmission. While admitting to the utopia of this transformation, the emphasis is again, as in Benjamin, put on social relations. as Brecht writes: «Durch immer fortgesetzte nie aufhörende Vorschläge zur besseren Verwendung der apparate im Interesse der allgemeinheit haben wir die gesellschaftliche Basis dieser apparate zu erschüttern, ihre Verwendung im Interesse der wenigen zu diskreditieren» (151). Though Benjamin and Brecht wrote their essays in a different historical context, as the shadow of fascism fell across the Weimar republic, they prove an apt frame of reference for Bandista’s practice of the politics of production as well as politics of aesthetics. The quote by Brecht above illustrates the Brechtian principle behind Bandista’s work; they transform the use of apparatuses of the existing social order (i.e., the internet, music industry), and disrupt the commonplace economic exploitation of both media (music and the internet), thus discrediting their use in the interest of the few for monetary gain and political control, while also giving access to these media back to any spectator who is interested, and opening them up for everybody to use, change, and produce. Bandista remove the division between artist and spectator by perceiving audience members and listeners as part of the collective, and by encouraging everyone to be part of the creation process and act as collaborators. This is also reflected in Bandista’s emphasis on the participatory aspect of their music and their use of techniques of collage - of genres, texts, melodies - through which, they, like Brecht, draw attention to the contingency of social, historical, and political processes. Collage techniques acknowledge the incompleteness and the ongoing construction of culture, which is exemplified in Bandista through their perception of listeners as collaborators in the production of meaning, their understanding of their works as provisional collaborations that are in progress and open to further transformation, by continuously being deconstructed, remixed, reinterpreted and re-rendered. Bandista’s work exists in a curious interstice, geographically speaking. While Bandista are internationalist in their political scope and transnational in their aesthetic choices and incorporation of diverse genres, their theoretical model for reconceptualizing and refunctionalizing the media through which CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 447 11.11.14 17: 50 448 Ela Gezen culture is distributed is a specifically national one, derived from Benjamin’s and Brecht’s work on the politics of culture. Moreover, they construct an intellectual genealogy that begins with Karl Marx, leading to rosa luxemburg, and situate themselves at the end of this genealogical trajectory. Digital media have been instrumental in Bandista’s increasing popularity, particularly facilitated through their website and their political participation in world-wide protests, such as the «Occupy Gezi» movement, that has been predominantly coordinated through social network interactions. Furthermore, in their eclectic musical genre choices, including Punk, Ska, and reggae, Bandista present a novelty within the folk song dominated political music scene in Turkey that had been in existence since the student protests in 1968 (Mehrabov 82). In addition to their attention to national concerns (Cypriot, Kurdish, and the armenian question) of relevance for contemporary Turkey, Bandista’s internationalist approach and mindset, foregrounded on their website, perceives and presents human rights violations of any kind in any context, as universal problems that need to be contested in solidarity. Music serves as a way to document, disseminate, disclose, and counter questions of racism, exile, forced migration, deportation, and asylum, using digital media as their tools. In the creation of their message, which relies on visual, sonic, and textual signifiers, and only emerges in all its complexity through digital media, they build on earlier traditions of Marxist protest from the German context, but apply these to worldwide issues. Notes I would like to thank Jonathan Skolnik for introducing me to Bandista, Seth Howes for being an invaluable interlocutor and Diogenes Costa-Curras for always being a sounding board to my ideas. 1 In the aftermath of the events surrounding May 1 st , 1977 public gatherings on Taksim Square were outlawed. Moreover, May Day lost its status as official holiday following the Turkish coup d’état in 1980 (Gökay 108). 2 «Yıllardır yaşanılan cinayetlerden çok da farklı değildi aslında. Yine tahakküm makinasındaki bir çark, yine nefretle, yine ayrımcılıkla, yine her türlü insani değeri hiçe sayarak bir canı yok etti. anlaşılan bu sefer maktul, vatandaş olmayıp sığınmacı olduğundan, üstüne üstlük derisinin rengi farklı olduğundan ‹öldürülmeyi hak etmiş› ti; tıpkı kadın olduğu, kürt olduğu, eşcinsel olduğu, ermeni olduğu, trans olduğu, roman olduğu, isyankâr olduğu, ‹hiç kimse› olduğu için ‹öldürülmeyi hak edenler› gibi. artık yeter […].» Translation mine. 3 The Encyclopedia of New Media offers the following definition of copyleft: «[It] is a general license agreement granted by a copyright owner permitting anyone to freely use copyrighted property, but under specific terms. Common terms of a copyleft license state that a copylefted work is freely available to all potential users» (Friedman 96). CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 448 11.11.14 17: 50 Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media 449 Works Cited ahmad, Feroz. The Making of Modern Turkey. london: routledge, 1993. Bandista. «Bandista.» tayfabandista.org. 2009. Web. 24 april 2014. -. de te fabula narratur. Oppa tzupa zound zystem, 2009. CD. -. sınırsız-ulussuz-sürgünsüz. Oppa tzupa zound zystem, 2012. CD. -. «Bandista’dan ‹anlatılan Senin Hikayendir›.» Interview with Bawer Çakır and Emine Özcan. bianet.org. Bianet, 23 May 2009. Web. 17 april 2014. -. «Bandista ein Bandkollektiv aus Istanbul.» Interview with Heike Demmel. freieradios.net. freie-radios.net, 18 Oct. 2012. Web. 17 april 2014. -. «Bandista ailesinde Eşitsizliğe Yer Yok.» Interview with Hanife Yaşar. hurriyetaile. com. Hürriyet aile, 23 aug. 2011. Web. 18 april 2014. Benjamin, Walter. «Der autor als Produzent.» Versuche über Brecht. Ed. rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1966. 95-116. Berry, David M. Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source. london: Pluto, 2008. Brecht, Bertolt. «Der rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat.» Bertolt Brecht: Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden. Vol. 6. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. 146-51. Dağlar, ali. «Pablo neruda, biz orada.» hurriyet.com. Hürriyet Pazar Gazetesi, 1 May 2011. Web. 17 april 2014. Friedman, Ken. «Copyleft.» Encyclopedia of New Media. An Essential Reference to Communication and Technology. Ed. Steve Jones. new York: Moschovitis, 2003. 97-98. Gökay, Bülent. Soviet Eastern Policy in Turkey, 1920-1991: Soviet Foreign Policy, Turkey and Communism. london: routledge, 2006. Herbert, ulrich. Geschichte der Ausländerbeschäftigung in Deutschland, 1880 bis 1980: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter. Berlin: Dietz, 1986. Koç, Canan and Yildirim Koç. Disk tarihi: efsane mi gerçek mi? (1967-1980). Maltepe, ankara: Epos, 2008. leyshon, andrew et al. «On the reproduction of the Musical Economy after the Internet.» Media, Culture & Society 27.2 (2005): 177-209. lüderwaldt, Detlef. «ausländerpolitik als ausländerverdrängungspolitik.» Türken raus? oder Verteidigt den sozialen Frieden. Beiträge gegen die Ausländerfeindlichkeit. Ed. rolf Meinhardt. reinbek: rowohlt, 1984. 105-18. luxemburg, rosa. Politische Schriften II. Ed. Ossip K. Flechtheim. Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1975. Mehrabov, Ilkin. «Turkey and Copyleft Music Production: reflections on Bandista.» Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 3.1 (2012): 80-90. Meier-Braun, Karl-Heinz. «Gastarbeiter» oder Einwanderer? Anmerkungen zur Ausländerpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Frankfurt a.M.: ullstein, 1980. Oppa tzupa zound zystem - Opzzz. «about.» Facebook.com. Web. 18 april 2014. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 449 11.11.14 17: 50 remixing Film Histories: Fatih akın and the Creation of a Transnational Film History BErna GuEnElI Grinnell College Fatih akın is the recipient of a variety of awards ranging from the Bundesverdienstkreuz, to prizes from the European Parliament, to honors in international film festivals. His films are critically acclaimed and celebrated at film events and in the press worldwide, attracting a range of diverse appraisal and offering a plethora of critical starting points for discussion. In the last decades, the scholarship about his films has been dominated by thematic concerns related to questions of minorities, integration, and identity politics in Germany (and Europe). 1 Yet by analyzing the aesthetic use of sights and sounds in akın’s films, we encounter a variety of new interpretations for his sonic and visual mixes and juxtapositions, in his use of diegetic and non-diegetic film music, in the dialogues, in very specific casting choices, and so forth. 2 These mixed and diverse filmic tools in akın’s films 3 ultimately compose, as I call it, an aesthetic of heterogeneity, defined as the filmic sampling and mixing of culturally diverse sights and sounds. 4 In this article, I will showcase another effect of akın’s aesthetic of heterogeneity by focusing on akın’s creation of a transnational film history and his contribution to a reevaluation of national film histories. akın has been discussed as a transnational filmmaker in scholarship (e.g. Gemünden; Halle; Mennel «Bruce lee»), but the question of how his transnational aesthetics contribute to the development of a transnational film history has not yet received much attention. I argue that akın’s exchanges with national film histories, such as Turkish cinema, are a part of his transnational filmmaking practices and aesthetics; at the same time, his cinema is also interrelated to and affects other cinemas. 5 akın’s cinema helps to undermine a strictly national categorization of film and film history by, for example, synthesizing intertextual references to Yeşilçam, Young Turkish, and new Turkish Cinema as well as new German and Turkish-German Cinema. using Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007) as a case study and examining in particular sound, casting, and mise-en-scène, I will discuss how akın’s filmic product is a synthesis of elements that are known from, for example, Turkish (and German) filmic traditions. 6 By no means are akın’s filmic references and intertextualities limited to Turkish cinema, 7 but within the scope of this paper, the fo- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 450 11.11.14 17: 50 Remixing Film Histories 451 cus will be on Turkish film, which ranges in this case from the artistically and politically ambitious Young Turkish Cinema to the commercial, star-driven Yeşilçam films, as well as to contemporary Turkish television and film such as new Turkish Cinema. 8 Finally, I argue, that akın’s synthesis creates a new, transnational film history by drawing on specific national filmic archives. 9 although recent film studies have suggested that the film industry is a transnational undertaking (e.g. randall Halle’s book German Film After Germany), film histories traditionally have been (and in large part, continue to be) read and understood in a national context, even though the transnational has risen as a category in film studies, the national as a category persists. nationally organized film histories dominate college course syllabi and book titles in publishing houses such as New Turkish Cinema (2013), German National Cinema (2010), A New History of German Cinema (2012), French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present (2004), etc. Traditionally, these types of film histories provide chronological overviews of national cinemas. Even if the technological development of film is the structuring element of the publication (e.g. from silent to sound to digital film, etc.), these parts tend to have national subcategories (Gomery and Pafort-Overduin). In his article «Where is national Cinema Today (and Do We Still need It? ),» Ian Christie states that, «[t]he theoretical contradictions and limitations of national cinema are well known, but the phenomenon persists» (20). Even though national cinema is questioned as a category, it is still flourishing as seen in advertising and at film festivals, for example, where films are marketed as national products (19). Christie provides a wide range of scholarship that is highly critical of the national as a category, citing, for example, Thomas Elsaesser, who sees national cinema, similar to national literature, as a bourgeois construct (24). Christie ultimately finishes by reinstating the importance of the national for film scholarship (28). nevertheless, despite the persistence of the national as a category, the last two decades have given rise to the transnational as a category for film studies (see also: Hake, «German Cinema» 110; Higbee and lim 8). The increased numbers of book and journal publications, across disciplines, on transnational film of the last years such as In Focus: Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (2006), Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (2013), German Film After Germany: A Transnational Aesthetic (2008), World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives (2009), Transnational Cinemas (2010 to present), and so forth, are a proof of this. This transnational shift highlights «cross-border cinematic connections» on cultural, economic, and geographical levels (Higbee and lim 8). additionally, there is film scholarship within australian, Scandinavian, and Southeastern cinemas that shows CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 451 11.11.14 17: 50 452 Berna Gueneli the wide ranging intersections within transnational film/ history (limbrick; Miyao; Transnational Film Studies). This scholarship begins to challenge the writing of national film histories with its transnational context. The website of the transnational film history symposium, Transnational Film Studies on lnu.se states, for example: Transnational studies both challenge and complement the writing of national film histories by seeking to explore how film culture has always and everywhere connected with developments that have transcended national limits. This can be seen in the fields of technology, economy, distribution, production as well as aesthetics and contents - ideologically and as pure entertainment. at the same time, there are scholarly works that react to the contemporary trend which views the transnational as a «new» category in (German) film studies (Hake, «German Cinema» 110ff.). Sabine Hake points out that the relationships of terms such as national and interand transnational are more complicated than their common use in recent scholarship implies, and that transnationalism in film has existed for a long time (111). She suggests examining film history to see the complex relations between these terms, beginning even with early cinema. ultimately, there are also scholars who are critical of history itself as a category. These scholars argue that the actual past remains a construct, written by people who have not actually experienced the particular history they are writing about, the actual past remains a construct (Gaines 72, 73). I see akın as part of a transnational filmmaking industry, in terms of production and aesthetics (as conceptualized in Halle). In that way, akın’s films are similar to the films of Michael Haneke, alejandro González Iñárritu, and Krzysztof Kieslowski, as Goktürk and Ezli have discussed in their work on globalization and akın’s cinema (Göktürk 35; Ezli «Von lücken»). I add, ultimately, that akın’s films also produce a transnational film history. akın’s films urge us to analyze new, intertextual constellations within (his) cinema. For the purposes of this article, the transnational history of film refers mainly to the films made in Germany and Turkey during the last century, the scholarship about these films, and to their intertextual allusions, citations, and references in akın’s work. Before I begin discussing The Edge of Heaven, I will briefly illustrate what I mean by akın’s aesthetic of heterogeneity and how it helps to create a transnational film history. By displaying distinctive musical and linguistic mixes as well as a variety of diverse characters and settings, akın’s films offer an experience of heterogeneity for their viewers. His cinematic use of diverse settings, cast, sound, and so forth ultimately constitutes his aesthetic of heterogeneity. Taking the film’s soundtrack as an example, we see how it helps to provide a sonic diversity with the work of German-romanian DJ Shantel, CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 452 11.11.14 17: 50 Remixing Film Histories 453 akın’s musical collaborator and the composer of the original score for The Edge of Heaven. The Edge of Heaven makes the sounds of a variety of European regions audible. Thereby, the soundtrack invites the film’s audience to «aesthetically experience a heterogeneous European polyphony» (Gueneli 337). That is, the film’s sound provides a sonic imagination of a multiethnic, multilingual, and diverse Europe. Shantel’s music is a mix from northern, southern and eastern European regions and the various languages spoken in the film feature different dialects and accents of the filmic characters, which are, in this case, cast from Turkey and Germany. Together these heterogeneous sounds testify to a filmic normalization of diversity and multilingualism. However, the acoustic representation of a diverse European sound is only one effect of akın’s aesthetic of heterogeneity. In several instances in the film, it also changes our perception of a (national) film history. The aesthetic (aural) experiences of diversity are partially a result of the interrelated (film) histories. We can explore this further by examining casting, sound, and miseen-scène. Through these, akın ultimately helps to create a truly transnational film history, as I will show in the next section. The Edge of Heaven is akın’s second part of the trilogy Liebe, Tod und Teufel (love, Death, and the Devil), which tells the story of three estranged parent-child relationships. The individual stories take the audience through a transnational journey depicting Hamburg, Bremen, Istanbul, and Turkish Black Sea cities and villages. In my discussion, I will showcase two scenes from The Edge of Heaven - the «Helenenstrasse» scene in Bremen and the «Meze» scene in Istanbul - that help us to better understand akın’s creation of a transnational film history. 10 Beginning with the Helenenstrasse scene, the film’s audience encounters a simultaneity of interrelated national film histories such as Yeşilçam, Young Turkish and new Turkish Cinema. let me begin by briefly describing the Bremen sequence: Very much in contrast to the film’s opening sequence in the Black Sea region (long shots, slow camera movements, and quiet musical soundtrack), the succeeding Bremen sequence, set during a May Day demonstration, begins with fast-cut images. The first scene depicts street demonstrators and a German marching band that accompanies them (Spielmannzug). a medium-long shot shows ali aksu (Tuncel Kurtiz), a smiling man in his sixties. The cheerful elderly man walks in the opposite direction of the May Day participants. The next scene shows the Helenenstrasse - Bremen’s long-standing red light district - which ali has entered. The scene is quiet. The focus is now on the man walking by the sex workers’ colorful 19 th century houses until he stops in front of one of the windows. after a quick conversation, the sex worker Yeter/ Jessy (nursel Köse), a woman in her forties, dressed in a latex outfit, 11 lets ali into her house. The static CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 453 11.11.14 17: 50 454 Berna Gueneli camera shows two crowded, adjacent rooms, which are rendered in red and yellow, creating an erotic ambiance. Shortly after ali comes in, Yeter turns on the cassette recorder. The music is a song by neşe Karaböcek, a Turkish pop star who frequently sung in the Yeşilçam films of the 1970s. Karaböcek’s song is a tango written by Fehmi Ege (1902-78), a composer of Turkish tango, operetta, and classic Turkish music. The soundtrack in this scene alone highlights transnational intertextualities and motives of travel and migration: Having roots in the colonial experience in the americas and the Caribbean, 12 the argentinian tango was created by European immigrants in argentina/ uruguay in the 19 th century. The Turkish tango, as featured in The Edge of Heaven, is the composition of a Turkish musician, and calls to mind the Yeşilçam films of the 1970s. The song’s introduction in the Helenenstrasse scene functions as an intertextual reference to this hybrid musical text and its transatlantic, multidirectional travels and, within the scene, emphasizes the melancholy prevailing in the sex worker’s house. On the one hand, the Turkish tango connects the two Turkish-German characters, Yeter and ali, and, on the other hand, on a plot level, it reveals Jessy/ Yeter to be of Turkish origin in the first place. For it is after Yeter plays the song that ali inquires about her nationality. Karaböcek’s interpretation of the song helps to create a nostalgic space for the two émigrés. It also helps them to get increasingly familiar with each other. This is underscored through the names that ali uses to address Yeter. He begins by calling her Jessy (her English name), moves to Yeter (her Turkish name), and ends with Gülüm (a name of affection in Turkish, meaning my rose). The song played from the cassette recorder is Karaböcek’s 1972 interpretation of «Son Hatıra» (last Memory). The medium of the antiquated cassette recorder, with its characteristic noise, as much as the melancholy song itself, creates a specific aural setting, an intermedial experience of exile and nostalgia for Turkey of the past decades that generates a connecting element between the two protagonists. 13 However, in addition to a cultural connection between Yeter and ali, Karaböcek’s song helps to establish a filmic connection to Yeşilçam, and therefore to Turkish cinema history. This sequence not only recalls Yeşilçam cinema, it intertwines Yeşilçam, Young Turkish, new Turkish, and new German Cinema through intertextual references. Yeşilçam itself is named after a street in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, and refers to a commercially oriented, star-driven, popular Turkish cinema that emerged in the 1950s, with its heydays from 1965 to 1975 (Kaya Mutlu 417; Suner 3, 7). Yeşilçam «produced cheap, low-quality films with large profit margins, [that were] solely aimed at the star system […]» (Ellinger and Kayi 582). While there were various popular genres such as comedies and CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 454 11.11.14 17: 50 Remixing Film Histories 455 gangster films, a large majority of Yeşilçam productions were melodramas. among these, Dilek Kaya Mutlu differentiates between the Yeşilçam films of the 1950s, the village melodramas (which have a rural setting in anatolia, in which the conflicts are played out within the same class) and the films from the 1960s and 70s, the urban melodramas (which predominantly feature a rural migrant in the big city, who has to struggle with the «westernized, urban» upper class. In these there is often a class conflict that needs to be overcome) (419). 14 While extremely popular and beloved by a large mainstream audience, Yeşilçam was heavily criticized by intellectuals. according to Kaya Mutlu, critics disapproved of Yeşilçam films early on: [The critics] not only viewed Yeşilçam films as undesirable and unacceptable but also condemned their viewers as «passive», «irresponsible», and «mindless» masses. Gaining a more political tone, such criticisms sharpened in the 1960s. Overall, to the critical intellectual eye, Yeşilçam cinema was not only artless but uninterested in the «real problems of Turkish society»; it was «commercial», «exploitative», and «fake» […]. (418) Furthermore, critics saw these films with their conservative content to be a «reproduction of patriarchal ideology» (418). until the 1970s Yeşilçam was a film industry that prominently produced films for a mainstream audience with a family-oriented and ultimately patriarchal filmic content. In the 1980s, when it had lost its family audience due partially to the arrival and spread of television programs, it turned to soft porn. This was a strategy developed to cope with the declining numbers of Yeşilçam audiences. The cinema industry saw a market with new migrant workers in the city (Dönmez 99). 15 Even though critics disregarded the classic star-driven Yeşilçam films, the films still have an impact in Turkey today, two to three generations later. Kaya Mutlu points out that the presence and recognition of stars and films from that era and the clichéd topics of Yeşilçam films are a common aspect of today’s popular culture: Yeşilçam cinema has […] gained a significant place in Turkish social memory and cultural imagery. Besides their frequent appearance on Turkish TV, one often finds references to Yeşilçam films in Turkey’s popular culture today, from commercials to talk shows, to music videos. Moreover, according to 2006 research conducted by the market research company TnS PIar, the Turkish public, even the younger generation, lists Yeşilçam stars first when they are asked to name three film actors/ actresses that come to mind. (417-18) according to Kaya Mutlu, Yeşilçam cinema becomes important for «Turkish social memory and cultural imagery» as produced in contemporary Turkish media. But Yeşilçam references are also reiterated in akın’s film, and thus gain CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 455 11.11.14 17: 50 456 Berna Gueneli a place in German cinema as well. That is, similar to the Turkish media quoted above, akın also partakes in revisiting and connecting to a transnational aspect of this cultural memory and imagery of Yeşilçam cinema. It is important to note that many migrants and immigrants in Germany and elsewhere in Europe watched Yeşilçam films on VHS. These were rented, for example, through greengrocers in the 1980s and 90s (Goldberg 420; Eren 176, 177) and constituted a large section of the viewers across Germany. Some films could also be seen on early regional Turkish-German TV channels such as TD1 Berlin. That is, Yeşilçam films belong to the cultural memory of many Turkish-German families living in Germany and by extension are part of the Turkish-German filmic memory of the first and second generation of migrants. Moreover, on a different level, there are thematic and generic connections between akın’s cinema and Yeşilçam. The popular Yeşilçam subject of rural/ urban migration and the topic of the migrant worker in Germany, for example, offers parallels. In terms of genre, many Yeşilçam films were melodramas. This is a genre that akın’s films play with, for example, in Head-On. In fact, akın’s genre-mixes, particularly those involving melodrama, put him in line with filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk and rainer Werner Fassbinder (Berghahn 251, 252). 16 Thus, I suggest, akın’s cinema encounters Yeşilçam, as well as German/ american melodramatic filmic traditions as referenced above, on a variety of levels, making it a part of a transnational film history. another link to Yeşilçam as well as to Young Turkish and new Turkish Cinema is made through casting. an example is the casting of the recently deceased, popular Turkish television actor Tuncel Kurtiz (1936-2013), who plays the role of ali in The Edge of Heaven. Kurtiz’s life and work became important additions to akın’s cinema. In his early career, which began in the 1960s, Kurtiz wrote and directed political satire, acted in and directed theater. These theater productions included plays by Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’neill. Kurtiz also acted in Turkish political movies that were critical of the government. In fact, he became famous for a role he played in an early film by acclaimed Turkish director Yılmaz Güney, the creator of the Young Turkish Cinema of the 1970s. In the 1970s and 80s, Kurtiz lived in «semi-exile» because of his pieces that were critical of the government. During this time, he worked in international/ transnational film and theater productions, including those for the Schaubühne in Berlin (Baydar). While in Sweden, Kurtiz even directed a film about «immigrants in the West,» the award-winning Swedish-Turkish low-budget co-production Gül Hasan (Hasan The Rose, Tr/ S, 1979) (Baydar). 17 Much later in his career, he was cast in Tabutta Rövaşata (Somersault in the Coffin, Dir. Derviş zaim, 1996), which was one of the first films to mark the beginning of new Turkish Cin- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 456 11.11.14 17: 50 Remixing Film Histories 457 ema, ambitiously also called the new Wave cinema of Turkey (Suner 143). This casting of Kurtiz created a connection to his earlier socially critical films from the 1970s. Finally, with his role in The Edge of Heaven, Kurtiz lived an international renaissance that brought him to Cannes in 2007. Through the actor Kurtiz, we get a wide-ranging connection to Turkish and international theater and cinema history, including to Turkish cinema legend Güney. These subtle Güney references in The Edge of Heaven are important for their political implications, when we consider Güney’s filmography as well as his biography. Güney began with commercial films and was associated with Yeşilçam in the early years of his career. He started his own production company in 1968, Güney Filimcilik, and moved toward a less commercially-driven filmmaking. Kurtiz starred in his 1970 film Umut (Hope), a political film about a man with economic and social problems in Turkey. Hope set the stage for a new Turkish cinema, which initiated the artistically and politically motivated Young Turkish Cinema (Ellinger and Kayi 598-99). In 1972, Güney was sentenced to several years in prison, due to his alleged criminal activities, such as «sheltering anarchist refugees» (Suner 5) and «killing a judge» (Kenny). He wrote several scripts in prison, including Yol (The Way, 1982), which had to be filmed by his associates while he remained in prison. Yol was prohibited in Turkey, but was smuggled out of the country and won the Palme d’Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. It is said to be «the most internationally acclaimed Turkish film ever made to date» (Suner 5). Güney managed to escape from prison in 1981 and lived his remaining years until 1984 in French exile. In France, he directed his last film The Wall (Duvar, 1983) (Suner 5-6). These Güney references in akın’s film open new historic archives and foreground thematic continuities. They relate to and commemorate a Cannes Film Festival winner, social-justice seeker, refugee, and socially critical filmmaker in exile. Güney’s criticism and quest for social justice from the 1970s and 80s seem to be continued in the stories of Yeter and ayten in The Edge of Heaven. The filmic narrative in The Edge of Heaven informs the audience that Yeter’s husband was killed in the seventies in Maraş. He was possibly a Kurdish political activist. Yeter talks about this incident during her first evening at ali aksu’s house. The viewer can infer that Yeter left the country for political and economic reasons after the death of her husband. Film scholar Daniela Berghahn perceives akın (and Fassbinder) not as political filmmakers as such, but states that «both try to marry the popular with the political» in their films (255). While I agree with Berghahn that akın manages to bring together the popular with the political, I nevertheless believe that akın is more political than this statement implies. akın references the above men- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 457 11.11.14 17: 50 458 Berna Gueneli tioned politically active time in an interview, and hopes that through his films he might provoke political consciousness in his audiences: There is also a political thrust. In the 80s, a lot of left wing people came to Germany, but the problem we have in Germany is that young people today are less interested in changing anything. Young people are really not interested in society, nor do they feel responsible for their society. My film is to provoke people to feel responsible for other humans. (Badt) additionally, Yeter’s daughter ayten (nurgül Yeşilçay) informs Susanne (Hannah Schygullah) in the beginning of the film’s narrative about her quest for «100% human rights.» This goal seems to be a direct continuation of Güney’s inquiries a few decades earlier. 18 ultimately, by casting Kurtiz, Turkey’s late flagship actor, akın connects his own film to an actor associated with recent television shows, with artistic and political cinema that had a «leftist social realist perspective» (Suner 8) in the 1970s, and with contemporary new Turkish Cinema. The intertextual references to these cinemas are not merely superficial allusions, but also work in different layers within The Edge of Heaven. The political messages and criticism of Young Turkish Cinema of the 1970s are subtly revisited thematically and linked to the socio-political complications in Turkey’s present, one such example is the position of the Kurdish minority today and also in Turkey’s recent history, in the 1970s/ 80s. This can be seen in the case of Yeter’s husband and her daughter fighting for the rights of minorities in Turkey today. Other instances in the film, depicting experiences of exile, deportation, forced migration, political injustices, and so forth, also create intertextual references to Kurtiz and Güney: ayten enters Germany with false documentation as an illegal migrant. While in Germany, the police discover ayten’s false identity and she undergoes the processes of applying for asylum. ayten’s asylum is eventually denied and leads to her deportation. at the same time, ali, who was in prison for murder, is deported to Turkey. These two deportations bring yet another layer of intertextuality: Kurtiz lived and filmed about experiences of exile in Sweden and Güney spend several years in prison before he fled to France. It is not only Turkish film history that informs akın’s transnational filmmaking and production of a transnational film history. It is, in fact, the synthesis of multiple (national) film histories. The Bremen sequence, for example, simultaneously provides intertextual references to new German Cinema (nGC), an equally politically and aesthetically motivated filmmaking that influenced akın’s cinema. The character’s name, ali, recalls the protagonist ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan guest worker and love interest of two women, in Fassbinder’s socially critical Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 458 11.11.14 17: 50 Remixing Film Histories 459 the Soul, 1974). Furthermore, the character of Yeter represents a connection to both Turkish Cinema and to new German Cinema. It is through the figure of the Turkish sex worker that a link between these film histories can be established. In feminist nGC, for example, Helma Sanders-Brahms comes to mind. The figure of Yeter suggests a similarity to Sanders-Brahms’s Shirin in the 1976 film Shirins Hochzeit (Shirin’s Wedding). In Shirin’s Wedding, the female protagonist (ayten Erten) plays a Turkish guest worker, who secretly follows her fiancé to Germany. Initially she works as a factory worker living in a hostel with other female guest workers, later she starts a cleaning job and moves out of the hostel. In the course of the film, Shirin undergoes traumatic experiences: she is raped, forced into prostitution, and eventually killed. although the pitiful figure of Shirin does not have the same self-confidence as her more independent filmic sister Yeter and is in many other ways different from Yeter, the figure of the sex worker connects the two characters. This figure has a history in Turkish cinema. 19 akın states The aging prostitute is a popular figure in Turkish cinema. However, she is always romanticized […] in that regard, the figure of Yeter can also be seen as my personal view on Turkish cinema. I like the figure [of the aging prostitute], but not the realization of it. It needs some more realism, some more dirt. a little less mainstream. For me, nursel plays that perfectly. (Monique akın) Though the Helenenstrasse scene appears to be nostalgic through Karaböcek’s music, we also encounter the very matter-of-fact workplace of a Turkish sex worker in northern Germany. This quasi-nostalgic setting, with a particular staging of Turkish-German migrants, not only suggests connections to different stages of Turkish cinema history, but also helps to create new images for Turkish-German characters. On the one hand, it connects different film histories; it connects to the mainstream Yeşilçam cinema through the music of Karaböcek and simultaneously to more political and intellectual cinema through the actor Kurtiz. The sequence refers to the figure of the aging sex worker, a well-known figure of Turkish cinema, whom akın transforms into a contemporary, rougher figure. 20 On the other hand, the sequence counters the stereotypical portrayals of Turkish-German guest workers as miserable characters. Such depictions, as known from early films about migrants in West Germany in the 1970s and 80s, are opposed by akın’s confident and bilingual characters ali and Yeter. They themselves, as well as their cinematic heritage, become a part of akın’s audible and visible heterogeneous cinematic Europe. at the same time, they help the viewer rethink questions of and categories around film history. «Meze in Istanbul» is the second scene I would like to briefly describe. It is a prime example of an intertextual use of the particular Turkish cinematic CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 459 11.11.14 17: 50 460 Berna Gueneli iconography of grief. In this scene, nejat and Susanne are dining together for the first time. Their mood is melancholic. Susanne mourns the death of her daughter and nejat his distancing from his father. The urban restaurant in Istanbul and the specific musical background in this dinner setting once more recall classic Turkish Yeşilçam films. a bird’s eye camera angle opens the scene and shows the individual Turkish meze dishes as they are being carefully positioned on the dinner table. The diegetic music is Sezen aksu’s interpretation of the song «Ölürsem yazıktır» (If I Die It Would Be in Vain) from her first pop double album Serçe from 1978. nejat and Susanne drink raki. Shots of rakı tables scored with a melancholic song like aksu’s are common in Yeşilçam cinema and are used to depict grief. Toasting with her rakı glass, Susanne states that she wants to drink tonight. The Turkish lyrics, the music, and the characteristic table settings are thus fused with Susanne’s and nejat’s mourning. The scene combines, peacefully and unproblematically, the local music and food with the two melancholic characters from Germany. The scene thus becomes an audiovisual, aestheticized celebration of grief, adapting sights and sounds of Yeşilçam cinema. This Yeşilçam aesthetic is portrayed by two actors, who are both intrinsically linked to German film history. Hannah Schygulla reminds of new German Cinema through her roles as a Fassbinder muse and actor in many films of the nGC, most notably in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), and Lili Marleen (1981). Baki Davrak is an actor in contemporary Turkish-German cinema and German theater. He played, for example, in Kutluğ ataman’s Lola & Bilidikid (1997) and in Thomas arslan’s Dealer (1999). Thus, this scene intertwines film histories through casting, setting, soundtrack as well as mise-en-scène. The Meze scene, like the Helenenstrasse scene described above, is an example of how film histories relate to each other, how their synthesis in a director’s work creates something new. The historical references do not simply stay on a surface level, but also have consequences for the film’s content. not only does this intertextuality invite rethinking regarding the validity of a national film history, it also incorporates the socio-political transformation these Turkish actors, directors, and various film industries stand and stood for into the film’s story. richard Dyer states in his famous book Stars that a star image is a «complex configuration of visual, verbal and aural signs. […] It is manifest not only in films but in all kinds of media texts» (34). Dyer also notes that a film «may bring out certain features of a star’s image and ignore others» (127). using Marlene Dietrich as an example, Dyer says, «[h]er face, her name even, carries the ‹mystique,› no matter what films she makes or what she says» (126). Thus Güney and Kurtiz, as stars who were vividly discussed CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 460 11.11.14 17: 50 Remixing Film Histories 461 in the 1970s, bring their complicated star-images with all their political implications into akın’s contemporary films as well. 21 as much as Güney and Kurtiz bring their socio-political features into akın’s films, it is important not to forget that the process is multidirectional and that akın’s films also enrich the actors and cinema of Turkey. What consequence do these references have for akın’s films and, vice versa, what consequence do the references in akın’s film have for the actors and films of Turkey? Considering, for example, that these references occur in akın’s contemporary European films which have received international awards and recognition, one might ask: What do the connections to Güney’s cinema and his controversial status in Turkey of the 1970s imply for akın’s film? How do these connections affect The Edge of Heaven’s or Güney’s films’ reception in the current, politically charged times? For example, socially conservative Turkish Prime Minister recep Tayyip Erdoğan has received much criticism from Europe for his handling of the Gezi Park protests in the summers of 2013 and 14, and for his short-lived ban of YouTube and Twitter in 2014. akın, too, has voiced his criticism of Erdoğan and solidarity with the protesters of the Gezi park through a YouTube clip and an open letter early in the summer of 2013 (akın, «Fatih akin appelliert»). a new avantgarde cinema and new actors of contemporary Turkish cinema are brought to the foreground against the backdrop of the political cinema of the 1970s. Through his casting choices, akın influences international recognition for Turkish actors such as Yeşilçay and Kurtiz, who with The Edge of Heaven appear at prominent film festivals such as Cannes and receive global attention. The reverse is true, too. In her discussion of new Turkish Cinema, Suner has a chapter on the Istanbul films that show new sides and perspectives of the city. In this chapter, she includes akın’s films such as Head-On and Crossing the Bridge which are partially set in Istanbul. although Suner insists that akın does not belong to the category of new Turkish Cinema directors such as prominent and award-winning nuri Bilge Ceylan and zeki Demirkubuz (Suner 77-140), she still mentions him as a contributor to these Istanbul films from a transnational perspective. She calls akın’s films «transnational Istanbul films» (153). Whether scholars pigeonhole akın’s cinema as «belonging» to a certain category of Turkish films or not, the fact that he is discussed in a Turkish cinema book and that his films have a variety of complicated references to Turkish film history challenges mono-nationally categorized films and film history. This challenge underscores the multidirectionality of transnational filmmaking and the transformation of film histories and archives in the process. It becomes important to read these transnational films as indicating a transna- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 461 11.11.14 17: 50 462 Berna Gueneli tional film history. Furthermore, by understanding Yeşilçam, Young Turkish, and new Turkish Cinema, the layers of The Edge of Heaven are extended and the film reveals a much more complicated structure. Taken as a case study, The Edge of Heaven demonstrates how our perception of not only «German cinema» but also German film history might be changing. The films and filmic examples urge us to rethink national frameworks when considering film history. akın, a director who has gone through the institutions of film production (and studied film), combines his academic knowledge with his cultural, filmic heritage and creates an artistic product that demands reconsideration of institutionalized concepts, such as film histories, but also film museums and archives. By including intertextual/ -medial references to Turkish classic, popular, political, and contemporary filmmaking through music, casting, and setting, we are subtly invited to recognize and analyze new elements about Turkish film in akın’s filmmaking. Vice versa, akın’s cinema expands and intervenes with Turkish and transnational filmmaking. That is, The Edge of Heaven becomes a new commemoration of film history. Seen as such, akın’s film forces us to rethink film history as a category. It challenges national conceptions of histories and, certainly, decentralizes film history made in Germany. Notes 1 See for example, Ezli, «Von der Identität,» 293-301; Gallagher; Knopp 59-77; Pratt Ewing 265-94; Schäffler. 2 recent akın scholarship has started to discuss individual aspects of these sights and sounds: Göktürk, «Mobilität und Stillstand,» 15-45; Gramling 353-72; Gueneli, «Challenging European Borders»; Gueneli, «The Sound of Fatih akın’s Cinema»; Hillman and Silvey 186-97; Kosta 343-60; Mennel, «Überkreuzungen,» 95-118. 3 Discussing akın’s The Edge of Heaven and Head-On, Daniela Berghahn uses the term «aesthetics of hybridity,» see Berghahn 239-56. 4 akın compares his way of filming with a DJ by referring to himself as a «cinema DJ»: «I try to find the right information for the image. I try to find the right images. The music in my film is also important. I am still doing my DJing in Hamburg. I am a cinema DJ. I can mix Fassbinder with Fellini. Cinema reminds of sampling. Costa Gavras’ movie Missing influenced me. I tried to shoot the runaway scene like Polanski would do it. I try to watch a movie a day. I watched a lot of silent movies before this. I really tried to tell the story in the form of a silent movie, without language. This is DJing.» (Badt) 5 For a discussion how transnational production influences transnational aesthetics see Halle. 6 Daniela Berghahn briefly also mentions homages and references to Turkish and German film history in akın’s film, see Berghahn 246, 252, 253. 7 Göktürk, for example, refers to antonioni [as well as to Coppola] when discussing The Edge of Heaven and akın’s filmmaking. akın himself states that the opening sequence CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 462 11.11.14 17: 50 Remixing Film Histories 463 in The Edge of Heaven is «antonioni-mäßig.» See Göktürk, «Mobilität und Stillstand» 35; Monique akın. 8 although, Göktürk as well as Berghahn also make brief references to Turkish film or film history (see endnotes 6 and 7 above), the intertextual references to Turkish cinema have not been analyzed in-depth as of today. 9 While akın’s cinema has often been analyzed within the framework of transnational cinema, his contribution to a transnational film history has not been discussed so far. 10 The analyses of these two sequences are based on a previous discussion of them in the context of akın’s soundtrack. For details please see Gueneli, «The Sound of Fatih akın’s Cinema.» 11 akın said that nursel Köse has the faith of many Turkish actresses over forty in Germany; they are left to play the «Kopftuch-Mutti» (headscarf mom). Yet, she is «too sexy» to do that. He states about Köse: «I think she is a great actress, whose presence reminds me of the divas of Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.» See Monique akın. 12 For further details see: Béhague’s entry on «Tango» in Groove Music Online. 13 Even though Yeter and ali belong to different age groups (ali is in his 60s and Yeter in her 40s), they represent the first (non-German-born) generation who left Turkey several decades ago either as guest workers or as political migrants. ali came in the context of the guest worker recruitment program (possibly in the 1960s/ 70s) and Yeter seems to have come at a later stage, possibly as a political refugee (maybe in the 1980s), however it is not clear under which circumstances. 14 «In Yeşilçam melodramas the tension between tradition and modernity is reflected also as a tension between different social and economic classes, while modernization is associated with the westernized upper class urbanites and upward class mobility» (Kaya Mutlu 419). 15 «During the turbulent 1970s, at the height of political oppression and censorship, Yeşilçam resorted to soft porn to attract the migrant male audience and compensate for its loss of women and family audiences to television» (Dönmez-Collin 99). 16 See also Berghahn’s reference to melodrama in akın and Fassbinder (and Sirk) (251-52). For a discussion of akın’s genre mixes and film style, see Volk 151-58. 17 Hasan The Rose is a film with a multilayered narrative about the exploitation of guest workers and also about the ambitions/ dreams of some foreign workers to become film stars. 18 However, toward the end of the film’s narrative, after lotte’s death and her release from prison, ayten seems to become more moderate as is indicated through her behavior toward Susanne and her actual early release from prison. 19 For a discussion of women in Turkish cinema, see Dönmez-Collin 91-105. 20 This transformation is also verbally hinted at in the introductory sequence between nejat and Yeter. Yeter explains to nejat that she is a prostitute. She uses the word «Hayat kadını» (lit. woman of life), which is a Turkish euphemism for sex worker, also commonly used in Turkish films. Since nejat does not understand the meaning of the word, she has to be more precise: «Bildiğın orospu işte» (a whore as you know it). 21 Other actors, on a less political level, who create a connection to contemporary Turkish TV and film are Erkan Can and nurgül Yeşilçay. In the second half of the film, we see ali’s nephew in Istanbul played by Can. Turkish audiences know Can mainly as Temel, a character from the Black Sea he played in the popular TV show Mahallenin Muhtarlari (Headmen of the Parish, 1992-2002). In this show, which takes place in Istanbul, Temel represents the large community of migrants, who came from the Black Sea to Istanbul in CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 463 11.11.14 17: 50 464 Berna Gueneli the course of the 20 th century. Yeşilçay, who plays ayten Öztürk in The Edge of Heaven, is a popular and renowned Turkish stage and film actress. She is known from cinema, theater, and popular TV shows such as Sultan (2012), Ask ve Ceza (2010), to mention just a few. Her acclaimed theater acting includes major roles such as Ophelia in «Hamlet» and Blanche in «a Street Car named Desire.» These references to and commemoration of contemporary Turkish film and TV becomes a part of The Edge of Heaven and therefore, have an effect on the film’s production, distribution, and audiences. Works Cited akın, Fatih. «Fatih akin appelliert an abdullah Gül.» Der Tagesspiegel Online. Der Tagesspiegel, 16 June 2013. Web. 12 apr. 2014. Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). Dir. rainer Werner Fassbinder. Filmverlag der autoren, 1974. Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven). Dir. Fatih akın. Corazón International, 2007. Béhague, Gerard. «Tango.» oxfordmusiconline.com. Groove Music Online. Web. 15.-March 2014. Berghahn, Daniela. «Seeing Everything with Different Eyes: The Diasporic Optic of Fatih akin’s Head-On (2004).» New Directions in German Cinema. Ed. Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood. london: B. Tauris, 239-56. Badt, Karin luisa. «Fatih akin ‹The Other Side of Heaven.›» parisvoice.com. parisvoice, 2013. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. Chapman, James, Mark Glances, and Sue Harper, eds. The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. new York and london: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Christie, Ian. «Where is national Cinema Today (and Do We Still need It? ).» Film History: An International Journal 25.1-2 (2013): 19-30. Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul. Dir. Fatih akın. Corazón International. 2005. Dealer. Dir. Thomas arslan. Trans-Film, 1999. Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant). Dir. rainer Werner Fassbinder. Filmverlag der autoren, 1972. Die Ehe der Maria von Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun). Dir. rainer Werner Fassbinder. Filmverlag der autoren, 1979. Dönmez-Collin, Gönül. «Women in Turkish Cinema: Their Presence and absence as Image and as Image-Makers.» Third Text 24.1 (2010): 91-105. Ďurovičová, nataša and Kathleen newman, eds. World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives. new York: routledge, 2010. Dyer, richard. Stars. london: BFI Publishing, 1998. Ellinger, Ekkehard and Kerem Kayi. Turkish Cinema: 1970-2007. Frankfurt: Peter lang, 2008. Eren, Mine. «Cosmopolitan Filmmaking: Fatih akin’s In July and Head-On.» Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sights, Sounds, and Screens. Ed. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel. Oxford: Berghahn, 2012. 175-85. Ezli, Özkan. «Von der Identität zur Individuation: Gegen die Wand - eine Problematisierung kultureller Identitätszuschreibungen.» Konfliktfeld Islam in Europa. Ed. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and levent Tezcan. Baden-Baden: nomos, 2007. 293-301. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 464 11.11.14 17: 50 Remixing Film Histories 465 -. «Von lücken, Grenzen und räumen: Übersetzungsverhältnisse in alejandro Gonzáles Iñarritus Babel und Fatih akıns Auf der anderen Seite.» Kultur als Ereignis: Fatih Akıns Film auf der anderen Seite als transkulturelle Narration. Ed. Özkan Ezli. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. 71-88. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry rowden, eds. In Focus: Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader. new York: routledge, 2006. Fatih Akın - Tagebuch eines Filmreisenden. Dir. Monique akın. Corazón International, 2007. Gaines, Jane M. «What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History? » Film History: An International Journal 25.1 (2013): 70-80. Gallagher, Jessica. «Der neue deutsche Film ist türkisch: Issues of Space, Identity and Streotypes in Contemporary Turkish-German Cinema.» Diss. The u of Queensland, 2008. Gegen die Wand (Head-On). Dir. Fatih akın. Corazón International. 2004. Gemünden, Gerd. «Hollywood in altona: Minority Cinema and the Transnational Imagination.» German Pop Culture: How «American» is it? Ed. agnes C. Mueller. ann arbor: u of Michigan P, 2004. 180-90. Goldberg, andreas. «Medien der Migrant/ Innen.» Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch. Ed. Charmine Chiellino. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. 419-35. Göktürk, Deniz. «Mobilität und Stillstand im Weltkino digital.» Kultur als Ereignis: Fatih Akıns Film auf der anderen Seite als transkulturelle Narration. Ed. Özkan Ezli. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. 15-45. Gomery, Douglas and Clara Patfort-Overduin. Movie History: A Survey. 2nd ed. london: routledge, 2011. Gramling, David. «On the Other Side of Monolingualism: Fatih akın’s linguistic Turn.» The German Quarterly 83.3 (2010): 353-72. Gueneli, Berna. «Challenging European Borders: Fatih akın’s Filmic Visions of Europe.» Diss. u of Texas at austin, 2011. -. «The Sound of Fatih akın’s Cinema: Polyphony and the aesthetics of Heterogeneity in The Edge of Heaven.» German Studies Review 37.2 (2014): 337-56. Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. 2nd ed. london: routledge, 2008. -. «German Cinema as European Cinema: learning from Film History.» Film History: An International Journal 25.1 (2013): 110-17. Halle, randall. German Film After Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic. urbana: u of Illinois P, 2008. Higbee, Will and Song Hwee lim. «Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Toward a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.» Transnational Cinemas 1.1 (2010): 7-21. Hillman, roger and Vivien Silvey. «remixing Hamburg: Transnationalism in Fatih akın’s Soul Kitchen.» Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens. Ed. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel. Oxford: Berghahn, 2012. 186-97. Kaya Multu, Dilek. «Between Tradition and Modernity: Yeşilçam Melodrama, its Stars, and their audiences.» Middle Eastern Studies 46.3 (2010): 417-31. Kapczynski, Jennifer and Michael D. richardson, eds. A New History of German Cinema. rochester, nY: Camden House, 2010. Kenny, alison. «Coming to Terms with Turkey through Films: Yol - by Yılmaz Güney.» todayszaman.com. Today’s zaman, 20 Sept. 2010. Web. 12 april 2014. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 465 11.11.14 17: 50 466 Berna Gueneli Knopp, Matthias. «Identitäten zwischen den Kulturen: Gegen die Wand.» Kontext Film: Beiträge zu Film und Literatur. Ed. Michael Braun and Werner Kamp. Berlin: Schmidt, 2006. 59-77. Kosta, Barbara. «Transnational Space and Music: Fatih akın’s Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005).» Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. Ed. Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel. amsterdam: rodopi, 2010. 343-60. lanzoni, rémi Fournier. French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present. new York: Continuum, 2004. Lili Marleen. Dir. rainer Werner Fassbinder. CIP Filmproduktion GmbH, 1981. limbrick, Peter. Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. new York and london: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Lola & Bilidikid. Dir. Kutluğ ataman. Boje Buck Produktion, 1999. Lyckliga Vi…. Dir. Tuncel Kurtiz. Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI), 1980. Mennel, Barbara. «Überkreuzungen in globaler zeit und globalem raum in Fatih akıns Auf der anderen Seite.» Kultur als Ereignis: Fatih Akıns Film auf der anderen Seite als transkulturelle Narration. Ed. Özkan Ezli. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. 95-118. -. «Bruce lee in Kreuzberg and Scarface in altona: Transnational auteurism and Ghettocentrism in Thomas arslan’s Brothers and Sisters and Fatih akin’s Short Sharp Shock.» New German Critique 33 (2002): 133-56. Miyao, Daisuke. The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema. Durham, nC: Duke uP, 2013. Pratt Ewing, Katherine «Between Cinema and Social Work: Diasporic Turkish Women and the (Dis)Pleasures of Hybridity.» Cultural Anthropology 21.2 (2006): 265-94. Saverio, Giovacchini and robert Sklar, eds. Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style. Jackson: uP of Mississippi, 2012. Schäffler, Diana. Deutscher Film mit türkischer Seele: Entwicklungen und Tendenzen der deutsch-türkischen Filme von den 70er Jahren bis zur Gegenwart. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2007. Shirins Hochzeit (Shirin’s Wedding). Dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms. Westdeutscher rundfunk (WDr), 1976. Suner, asuman. New Turkish Cinema. london: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Tabutta Rövaşata (Somersault in the Coffin). Dir. Dervis zaim. Istisnai Filmler ve reklamlar (IFr), 1996. Transnational Cinemas 1.1 (2010). -. 4.1 (2013). «Transnational Film Studies: Transnational Film History.» inu.se. linneuniversitetet Kalmar Växjö, 27 Feb. 2014. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. Umut (Hope). Dir. Yılmaz Güney. Güney Filimcilik, 1970. Volk, Stefan. «Von der Form zum Material. Fatih akın’s doppeltes Spiel mit dem Genrekino in Gegen die Wand und Auf der anderen Seite.» Kultur als Ereignis: Fatih Akıns Film auf der anderen Seite als transkulturelle Narration. Ed. Özkan Ezli. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. 151-58. Yol (The Way). Dir. Yılmaz Güney. Güney Filimcilik, 1982. CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 466 11.11.14 17: 50