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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts DISSIDENT STORIES OF TRAVEL AND DISPLACEMENT: MIDDLE EASTERN HERITAGE GERMAN WRITERS’ INTERVENTIONS INTO THE NATIONALIST IMAGINATION A Dissertation in German by Yasemin Mohammad © 2012 Yasemin Mohammad Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2012 ii The dissertation of Yasemin Mohammad was reviewed and approved* by the following: Daniel Purdy Professor of German Dissertation Co-Adviser Chair of the Committee Martina Kolb Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature Dissertation Co-Adviser Bettina Brandt Instructor of German Jonathan Brockopp Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies Reiko Tachibana Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature B. Richard Page Associate Professor of German and Linguistics Head of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures * Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines how German writers of Arab and Turkish heritage form aesthetic, cultural, and political reorientations in the process of imagining German national identity and history in the course of the twentieth century. Focusing on Unerwarteter Besuch: Auf der Suche nach der Gegenwärtigen Zeit VI (1997) by Aras Ören, Alman Terbiyesi (2007) by Zafer Şenocak, Der Marschländer (1999) by Hussain Al-Mozany, and Kafka und Andere palästinensische Geschichten (1991) and Absturz im Paradies:Geschichten eines Eingewanderten (1998) by Wadi Soudah, I engage in a comparative study of four male protagonists’ experiences of travel, displacement, and exile in the Middle East and in Germany, as dramatized in their major novels and short stories. Debunking an ethno-culturally defined German identity and collective memory, this dissertation contributes to a critical and nuanced understanding of the literature produced by German writers of Arab and Turkish heritage, thus moving beyond the prevalent paradigm that these writers represent the clash of contradictory worlds. Most contemporary research on the topic has focused on immigration and hybridity. My dissertation, by contrast, explores exile as experienced by individuals, who voluntarily or involuntarily left their homelands because of political, social, and cultural upheavals and dilemmas. I read exile as a complex and contradictory term: it involves not only feelings of nostalgia and painstaking loss, but moments of enrichment and empowerment as well. iv Each of my chapters depicts the protagonists’ negotiation of exilic experience in the twentieth century, as well as the effects this has on their understanding of time, space, language, culture, and the nation. Furthermore, I analyze how these protagonists’ experiences overlap with or differ from the other fictional characters who experience exile. I argue that the exilic vision of Ören, Şenocak, Al-Mozany, and Soudah instill them with a plurality of vision, which makes them question one-dimensional interpretations of ethnic, religious, and national affiliations. By drawing analogies between the national imagination in Germany and their own countries, these authors and their protagonists form transnational historical connections and enable new imaginary spaces of cosmopolitan existence. To the best of my knowledge, mine is the first study to bring into dialogue German writers of Turkish and Arab origin, who share the historical heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and who confront similar stereotypes and prejudices related to Islam and the Middle East. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………… viii Chapter 1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………... 1 1.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 1 1.2 The National Imagination………………………………………………………….. 9 1.2.a The Conflicts between Demos and Ethnos in Contemporary Europe……………... 11 1.2.b German National Identity and Minorities………………………………………….. 17 1.3 The Literature of German Writers of Middle Eastern Heritage……………………. 26 1.4 Exile and Literature…………………………………………………………………33 Chapter 2 Aras Ören’s Unerwarteter Besuch: Auf der Suche nach der Gegenwärtigen Zeit VI ..................................................................................................................................48 2.1 Introduction.................................................................................................................48 2.2 Language, Representation, and History: The Poet’s Crisis........................................ 55 2.3 Nation, Space, Time, and Identity………………………………………………….. 61 2.3.a The Poet Traversing East and West Berlin………………………………………… 61 2.3.b Heinz Lambert’s Visit to Kreuzberg……………………………………………….. 73 2.3.c Kadir’s Imprisonment in Kreuzberg………………………………………………. 84 vi Chapter 3 Zafer Şenocak’s Alman Terbiyesi………………………..………………….. 91 3.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………... 91 3.2 Exile, Language, History, and Representation …………………………………….. 99 3.3 Exile and Identity: Salih’s Crisis…………………………………………………… 113 3.4 Exile and The Nation………………………………………………………………... 121 3.4.a Salih’s Experiences with Turkish Nationalism and German Culture………………...121 3.4.b Salih’s Experiences during WWII in Istanbul ……………………………………... 140 3.4.c Salih’s Confrontation with Karla: Jewish-Turkish-German Encounters…………… 147 Chapter 4 Hussain Al-Mozany’s Der Marschländer: Bagdad, Beirut, Berlin………. 157 4.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………... 157 4.2 Exile and Identity…………………………………………………………………. 162 4.3 Exile and Language……………………………………………………………….. 171 4.4 Exile and the Nation ……………………………………………………………... 175 4.4.a Alwan’s Traumas in Iraq and Lebanon…………………………………………… 175 4.4.b Alwan’s Experiences in the Federal Republic ……………………………... 187 Chapter 5 Wadi Soudah’s Absturz im Paradies: Geschichten eines Eingewanderten and Kafka und andere palästinensische Geschichten………………………………………... 206 5.1 Introduction….…………………………………………………………………….... 206 5.2 Exile, Identity, and the Nation………………………………………………….........209 5.2.a Soudah’s Imagination of Palestine and Palestinian Collective Memory…………… 209 5.2.b Soudah’s Confrontations with German National Imagination………………………. 219 vii Chapter 6 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………. 237 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………. 246 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee, Dr. Daniel Purdy, Dr. Martina Kolb, Dr. Bettina Brandt, Dr. Jonathan Brockopp, and Dr. Reiko Tachibana, who supported and believed in me. In addition, I would like to thank the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University for granting me a residency during the summer of 2010. Furthermore, I would like to thank my parents, Yurdagül Mohammad and Sami Mohammad, who always supported me and encouraged me. Above all, I would like to thank my dearest friends Özlem Geyik, Deniz Durmuş, Evrim Özel, and Deniz Özel, who counseled me through my entire graduate school experience. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction When I began my research about exile and immigrant German writers of Turkish and Arab origin fifteen years ago, most of the prevalent discussions about these writers propagated an essentialist understanding of their cultural identities and focused on the trope of in-betweeness. In many research articles, emphasis was given to the identity dilemmas or assimilation stories of the characters in the works of these authors. The complexity of the characters’ exilic identities and past and present experiences was disregarded because of the one-dimensional understanding of their national, cultural, and religious affiliations. For instance, those German writers of Arab origin who drew on the Arabian fairy tale and fable/parable tradition gained more prominence for the entertaining values of their works. Unfortunately, these writers’ aesthetic, political, and cultural contributions to the German present and the critical analogies they formed between the collective memories of their country of heritage and Germany was not researched in detail. Nevertheless, in the last decade scholars such as Leslie Adelson, Andreas Huyssen, and Azade Seyhan have significantly transformed the debates on authors of non-German heritage. Adelson and Huyssen primarily depicted how German writers of Turkish heritage negotiated German collective memory and national identity through a new perspective. Seyhan, on the other hand, focused on these writers’ (including the Arab heritage writer Rafik Schami) critical affiliations with the history and collective memory of their home countries, and how these affiliations impact their present consciousness as transnational writers. While these critics approached the works of German writers of Turkish heritage in different angles, they all explored the multidimensional 2 engagements of these authors with the concepts of identity, memory, history, and the nation. All of these critics aimed at transcending the unchanged referentiality of the “Turkish figure” in literature and everyday life. For nearly four decades, especially the immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees from the Middle East have been excluded from the German national imagination. Although a large number of Turkish immigrants came to Germany as guest workers in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the arrival of asylum seekers from the Middle East in the 1980s, the lack of initiative to consider Germany as a country of immigration and the belated amendments in the 1913 citizenship law (based on “jus sanguinis”) resulted in the exclusion of non-German minorities