HOLEY BERLIN: LITERATURES OF MIGRATION

IN THE BERLIN REPUBLIC

(Spine title: Holey Berlin)

(Thesis format: Monograph)

by

Maria Mayr

Graduate Program in Comparative Literature

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada

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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. Canada THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO SCHOOL OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor Examiners

Dr. David Darby Dr. Nandi Bhatia

Dr. Jan Plug

Dr. Tobias Nagl

Dr. Petra Fachinger

The thesis by

Maria Mavr

entitled:

Holey Berlin: Literatures of Migration in the Berlin Republic

is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board

ii ABSTRACT

This dissertation analyses the ways in which contemporary German-language literature

written by authors of non-German origin or descent shapes perceptions of what it means

to be 'German' - and by extension, 'European' - in an increasingly multiethnic and

multicultural Germany. Berlin continues to function as the principal site for the official and popular self-conscious negotiation of a 'new' German identity since the Wende. Yet, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the fact that Berlin also figures prominently

in contemporary German literatures of migration. I therefore focus on a selection of texts

representative of Berliner Migrationsliteratur in order to determine what kinds of

theoretical and literary spaces allow for the arrival of Germany's and Europe's designated

Others in Berlin.

My literary corpus consists of Yoko Tawada's Pulverschrift Berlin, Terezia

Mora's Alle Tage, Zafer §enocak Gejahrliche Verwandtschaft, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's

Seltsame Sterne Starren zur Erde, and Feridun Zaimoglu's German Amok. I discuss each

work by drawing on a reading of Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's concept of holey

space, which mediates between striated national and smooth global space. For each of

these authors, Berlin and its surroundings offer holey spaces in terms of providing a

chronotopic place of arrival, as well as by forming a conduit between the past and present,

Germany and Europe, and Europe and its Others. The authors' holey Berlins thus escape

the narrow confines of the local and national and simultaneously prevent getting lost in

an abstract post-national and global European space.

iii Keywords: Berlin literature, literatures of migration, post-unification Germany, Yoko

Tawada, Terezia Mora, Zafer §enocak, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu

iv DEDICATION

To my parents and their open minds and hearts.

v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful for all the individual and institutional support I have received while

preparing for and writing this dissertation. First of all, I thank my supervisor, David

Darby, for his endless encouragement, kindness, patience, and guidance throughout my studies at the University of Western Ontario. I greatly appreciate his unwavering faith in

me and I am grateful to him for being a true mentor who dedicated so much time and

energy to nurture my intellectual and professional growth. His enthusiasm for and

knowledge of all things Berlin permeate this dissertation.

My gratitude also goes to my second reader, Janelle Blankenship, who pointed me towards the concept of holy space. Without her, the theoretical framework of this dissertation would have taken a very different shape. During my graduate career, I also benefited greatly from the support of encouragement of Melitta Adamson. She has been a generous and valuable source of guidance and advice in matters of teaching, funding applications, and the job market.

Throughout my time at Western, I have also enjoyed the help and patience of a great administrative team, namely Dawn Gingerich, Teresa Aconito, and Sylvia Kontra.

They have all contributed to making my time as a graduate student, TA, and instructor at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures both productive and enjoyable.

I am also indebted to the generous financial support from the Social Science and

Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and

Universities, and the University of Western Ontario. In addition, I would like to thank the

Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin for integrating me in their Graduate Research

vi Program during the fall semester of 2008, and the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in

European Studies for offering me a fellowship in the summer of 2007.

My thanks also go to the various friends and colleagues who have accompanied me during my years at Western. Especially the friendships and support of my dear friends

Naqaa Abbas as well as Agnieszka Herra, Duru Giingor, and Cristina Ionica, which have literally and metaphorically helped to sustain me throughout the years. Finally, I cannot thank my parents enough. These past few years would have been utterly different had it not been for their never ceasing support, nurture, love, patience, and encouragement.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of Examination ii

Abstract iii

Dedication v

Acknowledgments vi

Table of Contents viii

INTRODUCTION: Situating Migrationsliteratur 1

CHAPTER I. Holey Berlin Literature in Germany and Europe

Placing Berlin in Germany and Europe 9 Berlin as Holey Space 19

CHAPTER II. Tawada's Pulverschrift Berlin: Dislocating Europe 34

Tawada and Migration 35 European Japan and Japanese Berliners 39 Berlin Matters 46

CHAPTER III. §enocak's Gejahrliche Verwandtschaft: Archival Berlin 56

Canonized Berlin 57 Memory Elites 68 Berlin's Armenian Archives 70 Histories of Turkish Berlin 75

CHAPTER IV. Mora's Alle Tage: B. as in Balkan 84

Towards a Yugoslavian Turn 85 Abel's Placeless Silence 90 Abel with an Accent 97 A Balkan Berlin Republic 102

CHAPTER V. Ozdamar's Selfsame Sterne: Ideological and Performative Berlins 111

Ideological Idiom in West Berlin and Istanbul 113 Uniforms and Brechtean Costume 120 A Place Away 125 Distanced Arrival 132

viii CHAPTER VI. Zaimoglu's German Amok: Escaping Decadent Berlin 141

Sex, Filth, and the Wohlstandsgesellscha.fi 142 Unburdened Berlin 150 Byzantine Berlin 154 Religious Exit 159

CHAPTER VII. Conclusion: Holes and Tangents

Moving Forward 165 Moving East 170 Staying in Place 175

Works Cited 180

Curriculum Vita 207

ix 1

INTRODUCTION: Situating Migrationsliteratur

In recent years, there has been much debate over how to name and conceptualize literature written in German by authors of non-German background. This literature was

initially regarded as Gastarbeiterliteratur (guest worker literature) and reductively

viewed as presenting authentic retellings of the experience of mainly Turkish guest

workers who entered Germany since the 1960s. In the mid and late 1980s, this term was

replaced by Ausldnderliteratur (literature of foreigners) in order to acknowledge the

variety of themes and issues discussed by writers with migration backgrounds, which

reach beyond the concerns and experience of the migrant labourer. In the 1990s the new

term Migrantenliteratur (migrants' literature) was seen as being more accurate,

considering that many of those still perceived as 'foreigners' were by then actually

permanent residents and citizens of Germany. By now, it has become obvious that none

of these terms are fully satisfactory since they maintain as well as foster a divide between

what is considered Deutsche Literatur (German literature) and what is not. That is, these

terms presuppose that there is such a thing as German literature proper and implicitly

suggest that this literature has to be written by ethnic Germans.

A shift to labels such as 'intercultural' or 'multicultural' literature runs similar

dangers. While often meant well, these labels presume that there are stable, separate

national cultures between or among which this literature is supposed to mediate. The

multicultural approach also includes the notion of enrichment. According to this line of

thought, members of a perceived other culture are supposed to enrich the host culture.

The potentially trivializing effect of the enrichment approach becomes apparent

considering that the other cultures' riches are more often than not reduced to "pizza and 2 doner-kebabs" (Karakayali 4). In the realm of literary production, the enrichment approach presumes that multicultural authors are supposed to enrich the German language by drawing on their mother tongues, which effectively "treats these writers as second-class citizens for it negates their autonomous use of language" (Shafi 194). The pitfalls of multiculturalism are also political ones. As Himani Bannerji observes regarding multicultural politics in Canada, multiculturalism in effect neutralizes as well as trivializes power differences, pretending that "our different cultures were on a par or could negotiate with the two dominant ones" (96). Moreover, multiculturalism reduces political issues to matters of culture, which is a convenient method of avoiding addressing imbalanced power relations. Conflicts and problems faced by immigrants are thus depoliticized by reducing them to matters of culinary variety and ethnic dance (97,

Karakayali 4). Finally, the notion of multi- or intercultural literature also places the burden of representation on individuals of a minority background (cf. Cheesman,

"Juggling"). Minority authors are expected to engage in the intercultural dialogue as authentic native informants from 'their' culture, which severely limits their range of artistic expression as well as imprisons them in the status of the exoticized Other and eternal foreigner.1

In order to solve the problem of what to call and thus how to categorize German- language literature written by authors of non-German background, scholars have proposed a variety of concepts in recent years, some of which deserve a brief mention. In

1 The issues arising from the notion of native informant also constitute the challenges of a cultural studies approach to the literatures of migrations more generally. As Norbert Mecklenburg points out in his discussion of the "Grundprobleme deutscher Literatur von Minderheiten" (23), as a literary scholar one has to resist the temptation to (ab)use Migrationsliteratur merely to support or exemplify a pre-given overarching theoretical apparatus about issues such as globalization, migration, or nationhood. Doing so reduces literature to a piece of social evidence and prevents ascription of aesthetic value. 3

Global playing in der Literatur, Elke Sturm-Trigoniakis appropriates Goethe's concept of

Weltliteratur in order to rescue contemporary Spanish, German, English, and French language literature from the marginalized position imposed by terms such as postcolonial, multicultural, or Migrationsliteratur. Instead of conceptually subordinating these literatures to their respective national literatures by means of exclusion and marginalization, Sturm-Trigoniakis' term "Neue Weltliteratur" (new world literature) aims to accord this literature its own independent category and status. For her, this new world literature is marked by transit and constitutes a "ganze Literaturgattung, in der das

Unterwegssein zur existentiellen Lebensform geworden ist und das Ankommen von zweitrangiger Bedeutuung ist oder sogar nie zur Debatte steht" (212).2

While rejecting the term Weltliteratur, Ottmar Ette similarly argues that the literature written by non-native speakers of a national language does not exhaust itself in categories such as national literature or literature of migration ("Uber die Briicke" 180).

He opts for terms such as "Literatur ohne festen Wohnsitz" (literature without fixed abode) or "Literatur in Bewegung" (literature on the move), noting that this literature is marked by dynamism, dislocation, and continual movement rather than locatedness. For him, this literature simultaneously draws attention to national borders and transgresses them, and as such participates in what Ette playfully calls a F:ortschreibung. Ette argues that it is time to move beyond spatial metaphors in favor of highlighting the disruption of space effected by the inherently dynamic nature of this literature (181). That is, Ette calls

2 'A whole literary genre, in which being in motion has become the existential way of life and arrival is secondary or not even discussed'; Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German to English are my own. 3 F. ortschreibung denotes a writing (Schreiben) that continues (fort-) as well as localises (Ort). Ette argues that literature of movement displaces places and location, not by making them disappear but rather by means of multiplying them ("Uber die Briicke" 181). 4 for a dynamic concept that allows an escape from the established dichotomy between literatures of migration and national literature:

[.. .Es geht] weniger um Raume als um Wege, weniger um

Grenzziehungen als um Grenzverschiebungen, weniger um Territorien als

um Relationen und Kommunikationen. Denn unser Jetztzeitalter ist ein

Netzzeitalter. Es verlangt nach mobilen und relationalen,

transdisziplinaren und transarealen Wissenschaftskonzepten und einer

bewegungsorientierten Begrifflichkeit. (ZwischenWeltenSchreiben 26)4

Equally emphasizing movement but maintaining that space matters, Karin Lornsen's dissertation Transgressive Topographien in der tiirkisch-deutschen post-

Migrantenliteratur (2007) attempts to rescue contemporary German-Turkish writing from the minority niche by drawing attention to the way in which the analysed texts (re)create space. For her, a "thorough reading of textual productions of space that refrains from pinpointing the texts as homogenous minority literature" allows for this literature to escape categorization based on cultural background (Lomsen ii, iii). The mere fact that most of the works she focuses on have also been categorized as Berlinprosa,

Wendeliteratur, or Europaromane (5) shows that their meaning cannot be reduced to an understanding of their authors' ethnic origins. For Lornsen, post-migrant literature is a

"transgressive und sozialkritische Literatur," which distances itself from allegiance to just one national literature and displays a "gewisse Sensibilitat fur topographische Dualitaten"

4 'It is less a matter of spaces than of paths, less about drawing borders than shifting them, less about territories than relations and communications. Because our age is an age of the network. It asks for mobile and relational, trans-disciplinary and trans-real scientific concepts and for a motion-oriented conceptually.' 5

(10).5 Rather than being specific to the literature written by authors with a migration background, she characterizes these works as exhibiting motifs of migration, mobility, and uprooting that are inherent in what she refers to as the postmodern condition (12).

All of the aforementioned proposals of new concepts and metaphors to situate the

'literature of migration' emphasize movement and mobility. While they deconstruct notions of culture and identity based on exclusionary binaries, they run the risk of not allowing the literature in question to 'arrive'. That is, they do not take sufficient care to ward off an unquestioned celebration of notions of rootlessness. Championing metaphors and theories of free-floating, hybrid, shore-less subjects comes at the risk of denying the reality of the situation of many migrants and displaced peoples, which is pervaded by very real borders and hardships. Moreover, the often accompanying view of reality as fragmented and a "fetishization of difference, fragmentation," and incoherence renders political and oppositional agency impotent (Dirlik 347). Put differently, celebrating free- floating hybridity in a fragmented reality denies migrants a solid ground from which to act and improve their situation.

Leslie A. Adelson picks up on this denial of agency in her often cited critique of the rhetorical conceit of 'between two worlds.' Adelson aligns herself with scholars such as Yasemin Soysal, who rejects the concept of diaspora since it "suspends immigrant experience between home and host countries, native and foreign lands, homebound desires and losses" (Soysal 149). As the Turkish-German author Zafer §enocak points out, such a notion of a between ignores that there is no 'between' cultures but merely a

"Gravitationsfeld unterschiedlicher kultureller Einflusse. Es gibt kein 'zwischen

5 'transgressive and socially critical literature'; 'certain sensitivity towards topographical dualities' 6

Deutschland und Tiirkei"' (Zungenentfernung 42).6 Not only is there no 'in-between,' but there is also no such thing as one German culture or one Turkish culture between which to be. Cultures are not ahistorical, homogeneous, and stable entities between which

"unstable migrants are uncertainly suspended" (Adelson, Turkish Turn 4). Whether this suspension is based on negative "discriminatory exclusion" or viewed positively as "the home of happy hybridity" (5), it effectively denies migrants membership and does not allow for their arrival in the receiving or host culture. In Novels of Turkish German

Settlement (2007), Tom Cheesman elaborates on Adelson's rejection of an in-between.

Like Adelson, he is weary of terms and concepts that position the literature in question in an interstitial space deemed separate from the space of a so-called German culture (12).

Such conceptualizations ignore the fact that the "cultural-political thrust of most Turkish

German writing challenges precisely that view by asserting that 'Turkishness' is intrinsic to the evolving lGermanness'"(12). Acknowledging this inherence, Cheesman terms this literature a "literature of settlement" (12) which seeks and creates "spaces that are in, and of, both (and other) countries, but reducible to no one country: not 'outside the nation,' in the singular (pace Seyhan 2001), but instead 'inside the nations,' in the plural" (184).7

According to Cheesman, all of the current writing, despite its diversity, helps to cosmopolitanize Germany (196), and thus has settled firmly within its borders.81 agree

6 'gravitational field of different cultural influences. There is no between Germany and Turkey'; Instead of an in-between, Adelson proposes the concept of touching tales, which entails the "historical and cultural entanglements to which the transnational labor migration of the 1950s and 1960s has given rise in Germany" (21). 7 Cheesman here refers to Azade Seyhan's work on migrant writing, Writing Outside the Nation. 8 In an earlier article, Cheesman attempts to categorize the variety of literatures of migration according to the individual works' relationship to the burden of representation. What he calls the axialist writer "willingly—albeit in most cases not incompliantly—assumes the burdens of representation, in a more or less pedagogical spirit" ("Juggling" 478) but risks that his/her works are reduced to issues of a sociological rather than aesthetic nature. So-called glocalist writers, on that instead of focusing on a state of being torn between two planets and imprisoned by pain, it is now time to acknowledge that many migrants have both feet planted firmly on

German soil; they have arrived.9

In Chapter I, I therefore explore both in what kind of Berlin and in what theoretical space this arrival takes place. For this purpose, Chapter I elaborates on the

German, European, and global dimensions of Berlin and proposes a reading of Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of holey space. As I argue, holey space provides a point of arrival and refuge that escapes the narrow confines of the local and national and simultaneously prevents getting lost in a post-national and global world. The ensuing chapters illustrate the kinds of holey Berlins created by five different German language authors with a non-German background by means of close readings of their Berlin texts.

In Chapter II, I start by analysing Yoko Tawada's drama Pulverschrift Berlin, in which

Tawada evokes Berlin's Prussian and Japanese pasts in order to anchor Berlin in a fluid

Europe. In Chapter III, I turn my attention to Zafer Senocak's Gefahrliche

Verwandtschaft and show how it draws on Berlin archives relating to the Armenian

Genocide in order to open up spaces that allow for a fruitful convergence between aspects of Turkish and German history. §enocak thereby critiques and avoids present-day the other hand, seek "to construct new imaginative contexts in which the burdens take on different significance, receding from the foreground in a wider cultural-historical perspective" (483), thereby neither dwelling on nor completely side-stepping the themes of axial writing. A glocalist writer thus "undermines the notion that literature can or should 'represent' in the sense of speaking for some particular social group, by exemplifying the idea that literature represents only itself, and problems common to the human species"(486). 9 Reading literatures of migration for its political import, such as settling, could be accused of once more excluding this literature. For instance, Gerd Bayer argues that this literature is often read "to perform acts of a political dimension," which constitutes an "instrumentalization [that] stigmatizes these texts even further" (5). He thus suggests that these texts have to be read with a focus on their aesthetic aspects (11). While I agree with Bayer insofar as he advocates paying attention to the aesthetic aspects of the texts, my dissertations indicates that, as is the case for analyzing any literature, aesthetic considerations can go hand in hand with political ones for the literatures of migration as well. 8

German commemorative practices concerning the Holocaust, which merely serve to form

an exclusionary national memory culture. Moving on to Terezia Mora's novel Alle Tage,

Chapter IV sheds light on the possibility of, and obstacles to, arrival in Berlin for former

Yugoslavians and explores the consequences of this arrival and the wars in former

Yugoslavia for the self-definition of the Berlin Republic. Chapter V illustrates how

Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's Die Briicke vom Goldenen Horn and Selfsame Sterne employ a

Brechtean-informed aesthetics to reflect on Berlin's divided past. This approach

simultaneously distances her from, and at the same time allows her to arrive in, the city in

a space marked by non-identificatory narrative and ethical practices. Finally, I consider

Feridun Zaimoglu's German Amok, which invokes former socialist and present Muslim fundamentalist discourses to criticize the Berlin Republic as engulfed by global capitalism. Yet, Zaimoglu rejects both discourses in favour of a private religiosity, which

he identifies as the only site of refuge left in a thoroughly commodified Berlin. In the final chapter, I compare the similarities and differences in the authors' depiction and creation of a holey Berlin that would allow the post-Wende Berlin Republic to share in the process of forming a non-exclusionary Europe. 9

CHAPTER I. Holey Berlin Literature in Germany and Europe

Placing Berlin in Germany and Europe

Europe cannot be discovered [gefitnden], it must be invented [erfunden]. (Beck and Grande 7)

In this dissertation, I focus on how German language literature written by authors of non-

German backgrounds arrives in Germany and Europe by means of settling in Berlin, thereby (re)imagining its past, present, and future. Given Berlin's symbolic significance for the reunified Germany, which I will elaborate on below, it is not surprising that the city has become a dominant topos in German literature since 1989. The resulting 'Berlin literature' has received ample attention by contemporary literary scholars. However, to date, German literary histories and anthologies have paid relatively scant attention to the literature of migration in this context. For instance, Stephen Brockmann's 2007 overview of Berlin literature ignores the wealth of German language Berlin texts written by authors with a non-German background.10 Similarly, Stuart Taberner's German Literature of the

1990s and Beyond (2005) altogether eschews any discussion of the literature of migration and Berlin. Since I have proposed this dissertation, Karin Lornsen's dissertation

Transgressive Topographien in der tiirkisch-deutschen post-Migrantenliteratur has started to correct this situation by dedicating a chapter to Turkish-German literature's rewriting of Berlin. Also, Katharina Gerstenberger has since published Writing the New

Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature, which provides a thematic overview

10 See Brockmann's essay "Berlin as the Literary Capital of German Unification." 10 of post- Wende Berlin literature that includes several Berlin texts written by authors with non-German background." My dissertation's exclusive focus on what I call Berliner

Migrationsliteraturen (Berlin literatures of migrations) is an elaboration of both

Lornsen's and Gerstenberger's projects, in an attempt to give this important aspect of

Berlin literature its due. In addition, such a focus reveals that judgements, such as Phil

Langer's, that Berlin literature has lost any political and historical relevance after 1995 and merely reduces the city to a marketable product of pop culture, can only be sustained by ignoring the contributions of the literature by ethnically non-German authors.12 The literature in question situates Berlin in the context of global migration and addresses important issues surrounding identity and belonging in the Berlin Republic. As such, it repoliticizes the topos Berlin by inserting itself in and reconfiguring the discourses surrounding post-Wende German and European identity that are centered on an image of

Berlin as a world metropolis.

These discourses about identity have to take into account that today's Germany is a country of immigration. While Germany was adamant about officially denying that it is a country of immigration well into the 1990s and therefore did not have immigration legislation, its government has been forced to acknowledge that it has become "the

European country with the largest immigration population" in the past few decades

(Hintereder 9). In 1950 immigrants constituted a mere 1% of the population. By 2009, 7.1 million foreigners, that is 8.7% of Germany's population, resided in Germany (BAMF,

11 Specifically, Gerstenberger includes Zafer §enocak's Der Erottomane, Ozdamar's Selfsame Sterne, Kaminer's Russendisko, Yade Kara's Selam Berlin, and Irina Liebman's docu text Stille Mitte Berlin. Each of these works is treated in one to four pages each. See Gerstenberger. 12 Langer's verdict is also questionable considering some Berlin literature written by ethnic Germans, just as the obviously politically motived novel Berliner Verhaltnisse (2005) by Raul Zelig. 11

"Auslanderzahlen" 7). Of the latter, about 1.5 million are second- or third-generation immigrants. In addition, there are 1.5 million foreigners who have taken German citizenship and about 4.5 million repatriates,13 who came primarily from the former

Soviet Union, Romania and Poland after 1989 (BAMF, "Migrationsbericht" 138). In other words, almost every sixth resident of Germany has either immigrated or comes from an immigrant family (139).

In 2000 and 2005, the Federal Republic's legislation finally acknowledged this reality. From 1914 until January 1, 2000, German citizenship law was based solely on the principle of ius sanguinis: that is, citizenship was determined based on blood lineage or familial descent (Adelson, Turkish Turn 7). In 2000, the government added a qualified version of the principle of ius soli: that is, the granting of citizenship based on birth on

German soil. On January 1, 2005, Germany for the first time implemented an

Immigration Act, which distinguishes between limited residence permits and unlimited right of residence (Hintereder 139).

As this brief overview of current German demography illustrates, the nature of

German national identity can no longer be (if it ever has been) easily defined. If 'being

German' no longer means being an ethnic German, what does it mean? This question has come to the foreground - in academic and popular discussion as well as in public policy - especially urgently since the reunification of Germany in 1990. Therefore, it is important to position any re-conceptualization of Migrationsliteratur within the context of post-

13 Repatriates are foreign-born ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, such as the Volga Germans who settled along the Volga River in the 18th century and maintained some degree of German language, customs, and culture over the centuries. Under the German law of return, citizenship is granted to refugees or expellees of German ethnic origin. See the section on Ethnic German Repatriates on the website of the Bundesministerium des Inneren . 12

Wende literatur.14 Questions arising from this added context are manifold. For instance, does the need, to speak in Benedict Anderson's terms, to imagine a new community for the united German nation necessitate identifying a common Other against whom national identity can be defined? Zafer §enocak, a prominent German-Turkish author and public intellectual, cautions that post-Wende Germany is preoccupied with "Homogenitat statt

Heterogenitat, Einheit statt Vielfalt, Monolog statt Dialog" (Zungenentfernung 30).15

Given the marked increase in violence against so-called foreigners after unification, one has to concur. Post-1990 united Germany is also confronted with the legacy of at least two parallel histories and identities; that is, it needs to accommodate decades of both East

German and West German past. Does Germany's literature of migration engage with this multiple history, and if so how? How do these multiple histories influence this literature's visions of individual and national identity and shape its revisioning of a homogenous and exclusivist conception of Germanness?

Berlin provides a unique case study for tackling these questions. Post-1990

Germany is often referred to as the Berlin Republic. Once more the capital of a unified

Germany, Berlin has contested symbolic significance for Germany at large. The city concentrates modern German history within its boundaries; it was the capital of Prussia

(1701-1918), the Second German Empire (1871-1918), the Weimar Republic (1919-

1933), the Third Reich (1933-1945), and the German Democratic Republic (1949-90).

After WWII, it became a city split between East and West. In the course of history,

Berlin was a centre for enlightenment ideals under Frederick the Great, a hotspot for

14 'Wende,' meaning 'turn', is a term used to refer to the events leading up to the reunification of Germany. 15 'Homogeneity instead of heterogeneity, unity instead of plurality, monologue instead of dialogue.' 13 liberal subcultures in the 1920s, and the site of the Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken

Glass). It was supposed to become the 'Welthauptstadt Germania' according to Hitler's megalomaniac imaginations, and was in large part destroyed in WWII. Finally, with the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, post-WWII Berlin also became "a metaphor for divided Germany [as...] the land between the two great political systems, a kind of microcosm of Germany - or even Europe - as a whole" (Small and Ross 63).

The city has retained its metaphorical status after reunification and has become the principal locality upon which Germany self-consciously and publicly negotiates its identity, making Berlin politically a highly charged site. In fact, as Olaf Kuhlke convincingly argues, "the multiple discourses supporting and contesting the reconstruction of German national identity followed, and are intimately tied to, one specific geographic phenomenon: the highly debated and contested relocation of the

German capital and center of government from Bonn to Berlin" (1). While the architecture of the interim capital of Bonn shied away from claims to symbolic representativeness on account of the intrinsically symbolic nature of Third Reich architecture, the "dream of representative buildings" has once more be deemed acceptable for a democratic capital such as Berlin (Seltzer 66-8).

Free once more to be representative, the post-Wall reconstruction of Berlin has become intrinsically symbolic and has been used as a means to negotiate the city's past.

For instance, proponents of a 'critical reconstruction' of Berlin aimed at rewriting

German history as continuous by simply side-stepping the aporia of the Holocaust, implicitly declaring the latter irrelevant to today's German identity (Huyssen "Voids" 14

81).16 Similarly, the decision to rename former East Berlin streets and squares by reverting to their pre-socialist names is not only a "final burst of cold war ideology" (60) but also signifies that the official history of the united Germany attempts to efface its socialist legacy.17 On the other hand, the Jewish Museum and the Memorial for the

Murdered Jews of Europe is an attempt to keep the memory of Germany's most 1 8 murderous past alive.

Berlin's new facade is not merely oriented toward selective processes of preserving or erasing the city's troubled past. For politicians and the public alike, it is also the image of Germany's new present and future as a European country. Not long after the reunification of Germany, the Maastricht Treaty was ratified in 1992, which finalized the decision to introduce the Euro and thus re-emphasized that the EU is becoming a transnational entity whose nature forces its member states to look beyond issues of national identity. As Kuhlke puts it:

[T]he increased European integration of Germany has significant impact

on the construction and representation of national identity. Both in the

material landscape and in public performance in Berlin, Germany is

increasingly represented - by the government, the popular media and

German citizens - as 'open to the world' (weltojfen) and tolerant to

multiculturalism. (12)

16 Huyssen points to the Mietkaserne and the Kiez as examples of the conservative impulses behind critical reconstruction, advocated by architects such as Vittorio Lampugnani and the post- Wende Senate director of architecture, Hans Stimmann ("Voids" 67). The rebuilding of Hotel Adlon to its pre-war state serves as a prime example of the results of critical reconstruction (Steweart 54). 17 A fact which reminds one of §enocak's aforementioned claim that German unification (Vereinigung) often entails homogenization (Vereinheitlichung). 181 will discuss the questionable nature of this attempt in the context of my analysis of Zafer §enocak's Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft. 15

Indeed, Berlin's multicultural nature is a present reality.19 Berlin's division by the Wall in

1961 and the ensuing labour-shortages necessitated another call for foreign guest- workers.20 As a result, today almost 14% of the city's inhabitants are of foreign nationality, while nearly 18% are estimated to be of non-German origin or descent.21

Thus, Zafer §enocak's verdict that "Berlin is a city of immigration par excellence" is quite appropriate ("Capital" 143). As Kuhlke notes, this fact is utilized to bolster

Germany's image within a European context. Thus, Berlin is an important site upon which not only German, but also European identity is negotiated.

In fact, Berlin reminds us that when speaking of identity in the German context today, one also has to consider the discourse surrounding the call for an integrated

European identity, which is often centered on questions of cultural belonging. As the so- called European Leitkulturdebatte, which reached one of its climaxes in 2000-2001, illustrates, there are calls for Europe to become more than merely a political and economic Zweckgebilde (Melzer 4). The CDU Bundestag member Friedrich Merz misappropriated the term Leitkultur from Bassam Tibi and introduced it into German political discourse in 2000.22 He thereby also re-invoked the tradition of the German

19 As Hinrich C. Seeba emphasizes, this 'multicultural' face of Berlin is not a complete novelty. In fact, in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War by 1700, every fifth Berliner was a native speaker of French, which the city's topography testifies to in place names such as Fanzosische Strasse or the Charite (5). These names are "reminders of the first wave—avant la lettre—of invited Gastarbeiter" who were initially fully accepted but then excluded and threatened in the name of German resistance against the French occupation of Berlin (1806-13) under Napoleon (5). 20 As Adelson points out in 'Touching Tales," surprisingly little attention has been paid to the fact that there is a causal link between the building of the wall and the labour recruitment agreements with Turkey (96). 21 Der Beauftragte des Berliner Senats fur Integration und Migration, http://www.berlin.de/lb/ intmig/ statistik/ demografie/einwohner_staatsangehoerigkeit.html. 11. July 2007 22 Tibi first coined the term Leitkultur in 1996 ("Multikultureller"). He has distanced himself from the way in which his term has been used in German political discourse ever since. For instance, he emphasizes that he used the term to denote a European, not a German, consensus of values 16

Kulturnation and called for a European Leitkultur or Leitidee to provide an 'ideological foundation' for the ever expanding European Union.23 In an article in Die Welt, Norbert

Lammert similarly argues:

Wenn ein Europa der Vielfalt nationale Identitaten bewahren und dennoch

eine kollektive Identitat entwickeln soil, braucht es eine politische

Leitidee, ein gemeinsames Fundament von Werten und Uberzeugungen.

Eine solche europaische Leitidee bezieht sich notwendigerweise auf

gemeinsame kulturelle Wurzeln, auf die gemeinsame Geschichte, auf

gemeinsame religiose Traditionen.24

Such a version of a European Leitkultur based on a democratic/Enlightenment/Christian trinity essentially renders Europe a paradise that closes its doors to those countries and individuals from different political, cultural or religious backgrounds.

Berlin has a tradition of exclusionary visions of cultural identity that reaches far

beyond Nazi Germany. Romantics such as Herder, for example, felt that the German culture was intrinsically tied to the German language. During the French occupation of

Prussian Berlin, the large portion of native French speakers in Berlin as well as its Jewish population was ostracized on account of "linguistic exclusion" that was predicated on

(Wertekonsenz) based on secular and democratically established values ("Leitkultur"). See his two articles "Mutikurleller Werte-Relativismus" and "Leitkultur als Wertekonsens." 23 A succinct overview of the history of the term Kulturnation relevant to my overall project can be found in Susanne Helene Hoelscher-Whiting's dissertation Berlin identities: Literature and film in the New German Capital on pgs 8-18. Hoelscher-Whiting also points to interesting similarities between Anderson's imagined communities and the notion of the Kulturnation. 24 'If a Europe of diversity is to preserve national identity and nevertheless develop a collective identity, it needs a political guiding idea, a common fundament of values and convictions. Such a European guiding idea necessarily draws on common cultural roots, on the common history, on common religious traditions'; In an article published in 2000, Adelson suggested in a footnote that this "particular discursive chain (democratic/European/Christian) may well be breaking up, at least in some sectors" ('Touching Tales" 97). In the corresponding passage in her book The Turkish Turn, published five years later, this footnote is no longer existent. This may in part be due to a reconsolidation of this discourse after the events of September 11, 2001. 17 notions of purity and origin (Seeba 10). This discourse of a common origin is confined neither to the German context, nor to the past. As the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon outlines under the heading 'Culture,' the Union is not only dedicated to encouraging the

"flowering of the cultures of the Member States" but "at the same time [to] bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore."25 This wording presupposes that there is such a common cultural heritage in the first place. As Kalypso Nicolaidis points out, this

'EuroMyth' of a shared historical and religious past posits Europe not as an entity to become but rather as "an age old reality" (Nicolaidis), and thus as something that has existed for a long time and therefore cannot be contested. This EuroMyth also propagates

Europe's self-appointed missionary role as the center for universal values (Braidotti,

Transpositions 80), and thereby blatantly ignores the historical reality that these values have contributed to justifying colonialism, fascism, and the Holocaust. These events were all in part driven by a logic of origin, purity, and exclusion, which is now once more being mobilized to deal with Europe's predominantly Muslim Other.

In light of the pitfalls of building a future Europe on notions of an inherited common cultural heritage, a broad variety of alternative visions for grounding a European identity or for 'new imaginaries of European belonging' (Amin 2) have been put forth.

As Rosi Braidotti points out, "European identity [is] one of the most contested areas of political and social philosophy at the moment" (Transpositions 72).26 Braidotti herself participates in this discourse and calls for a post-Eurocentric, minoritarian, nomadic, and

25 The proper name being the 'Treaty on European Union' and the 'Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union', signed on 13 December 2007 in Lisbon. The full text of the Treaty can be downloaded at http://bookshop.europa.eu/ and the quote is derived from Title XIII- Culture, Article 167. 26 Rosi Braidotti's philosophy of a nomadic ethics is profoundly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari and I will draw on her work throughout this dissertation. See Nomadic Subjects and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. 18 post-nationalist European social imaginary ("Gender" 140, Transpositions 87). Her vision is not far from that of Giorgio Agamben, who argues that Europe cannot be conceived as "an impossible 'Europe of nations'" but rather as an "aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizen and noncitizen) would be in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of European would mean the citizen's being-in-exodus" (118). John Rajchman puts forth a similar vision when calling for a Europe of "minor politics," which assumes that "in some sense we are all potentially from a strange 'nowhere' prior to 'territorial' definitions, a 'people to come'" ("Diagrams" 50).27 Also taking a similar path, the geographer Ash Amin proposes an idea of Europe that publicises "empathy and engagement with the stranger as the essence of what it is to be 'European'" (Amin) and the migration and globalization scholar Robin Cohen reinvents the idea of Europe based on "empathy for the stranger"

(13).

What all of these approaches have in common is an emphasis on the fact that

Europe as such does not exist. There is no Platonic true idea of what a European or

Europe is, no ideal form to be imposed on others. Rather, Europe is a project, a process that has to be continually renegotiated based on non-essentialist notions of Europeans and

Europe. In Cosmopolitan Europe, the sociologist Ulrich Beck and the political scientist

Edgar Grande summarize this notion of Europe as a process rather than an entity: 28

27 Like Braidotti, Rajchman's philosophical thought is steeped in Deleuzean thought, which he both explicates and elaborates on. See The Deleuze Connections and Constructions. 28 Here, it is worth mentioning that Beck and Grande, in opposition to, for example, Braidotti and Agamben, do not envision a post-national Europe. Their 'cosmopolitan Europe is "not only the antithesis of, but also presupposes, a national Europe, i.e., a Europe of nations. It cannot simply abolish national Europe but must cosmopolitanize it from within" (16). The way in which Beck and Grande envisage this cosmopolitanization from within is based on a concept of nationally 19

Whether one equates Europe with the European Union and its member

states or understands it as a larger geographical and political space, Europe

as such does not exist, only Europeanization in the sense of an

institutionalized process of permanent change. [...] Europe is not a fixed

condition. Europe is another word for variable geometry, variable national

interests, variable involvement, variable internal-external relations,

variable statehood and variable identity. (6)

Drawing on Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities, Beck and Grande suggest that Europe is not something that can be defined by a delimited territory, a certain race, religion, culture, or language. Rather, it is an imaginary space that is in constant need of invention and construction. In light of the fact that Europe cannot be discovered

[gefunden] but must be invented [erfunden], this dissertation investigates how contemporary German language Berlin literature invents alternative visions of Europe.

Berlin as Holey Space

Strange peoples, dolicocephalics and brachycephalics who mix and spread across all of Europe. Are they the ones who kept up the mines, boring holes in European space from every direction, constituting our European space? (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 414)

In order to escape from a German and European Leitkultur based on notions of blood and origin, which could potentially lead to the extermination of those with a differently shaped head in a final solution, alternative visions of Europe are necessary. These visions rooted cosmopolitanism that is similar to Kwame Anthony Appiah's. See Apphiah's "Cosmopolitan Patriots." 20 have to address the difficulty of balancing the need to make room for immigrants to arrive and settle in Europe on the one hand, and also prevent the growth of undesirable and inflexible roots on the other. That is, Europe has to allow for a space and position which is inside the system while retaining a distance from the system in order not to be submerged by it. It is the search for such a place that encouraged Deleuze and Guattari to develop their notion of the 'minor.'

In her by now quite seminal Writing Outside the Nation (2001), Azade Seyhan argues against invoking Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'minor literature' in the

German context. For her, the concept of minor literature cannot apply to German- language works written by non-native authors in Germany since they do not use a deterritorialized major language, as did the German speaking Jews in Prague or the

English speaking authors in India.

Their medium is not a "deterritorialized" major language but one that still

occupies its natural territory and has annexed the textual domain of the

foreign writer who contributes to the literary history of the host country in

the currency of its national language. ... [Although Deleuze and Guattari

articulate their theoretical project through an apparently specific

geography, history, and writer [i.e., Kafka], they abstract the theory away

from a genuine encounter with particular political contexts and historical

situations. (27)

Seyhan argues that the notion of minor literature is not socio-historically grounded enough, and she also disagrees with Deleuze and Guattari's notion that major literature makes a de-politicized use of language. Moreover, she notes that the concept of minor 21 literature is not specific enough. The criteria for a literature to be minor, that is, a deterritorialized use of a major language, political engagement, and collective value

(Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17), are, according to Seyhan, applicable to "most exemplary works of literature," regardless of their being minor or major (29). Most importantly for my purposes, Seyhan points out that Deleuze and Guattari fail to prevent

"language's line of escape" from inevitably ending in "silence, the interrupted, the interminable, or even worse" (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 26).

One might agree with Seyhan's criticism if one approached Deleuze and Guattari from the perspective of linguistic hybridity, as Seyhan does, and if one limits their understanding of the "minor" to their text on Kafka. Reading their later collaborative work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in order to theorize the position of migrant artists in today's global cities, however, reveals that their theories are anything but depoliticized and acontextual.9Q In order fully to understand the way in which Deleuze and Guattari's theories can help one to conceptualize a Europe beyond the

EuroMyth, a detailed summary of their rhizomatic thought as outlined in A Thousand

Plateaus is necessary. This summary in turn allows one to better understand their notion of striated, smooth, and holey space as postulated in A Thousand Plateaus.

Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome as a metaphor for thinking that escapes totalization or a structure that overcodes everything in an attempt to force it into a unity or the One. Their theory does not provide a blueprint for resistance or political action.

Rather, it allows for conceiving space in such a way as to make the thinking of resistance

29 From now on referred to as ATP in parenthesis. A Thousand Plateaus was preceded by the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, that is, Anti-Oedipus in 1972. All subsequent .A Thousand Plateaus' translations are from Brian Massumi's 1987 edition published by the University of Minnesota Press. 22 possible; it calls for "active experimentation, since we do not know in advance which way a line is going to turn" (Deleuze, Dialogues II137). Deleuze and Guattari insist on the rhizome as a metaphor superior to any other kind of metaphor such as a tree or a tap­ root. They reject the tree or root because "as an image [it] endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four," meaning that "[b]inary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree" (ATP 5). The 'law of the One,' ruled by binary logic, thus ensures that true multiplicity is never achieved in this kind of ontology

(5). As an alternative, Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome as an image that allows for multiplicity, since there are "no points or positions in a rhizome, as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines" (8).

The rhizome has three different kinds of lines: the "molar or rigid line of segmentarity" (195), lines of "molecular or supple segmentation" (196) and the line of flight (197). Lines of segmentarity are the ones that clearly mark out binary segments.

For instance, a person can be segmented by dichotomous classifications such as race

(white-coloured), gender (male-female), or class (rich-poor). Moreover, they describe the trajectory of a normal, that is, norm-governed, individual from a point A (kindergarten) to

B (elementary school). Hence, lines of segmentarity fix one's identity or "proper name" and thus secure as well as control life; they are the lines in the rhizome "according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed" (9). Thus, segmentary lines are the forces of striation, the processes that contour space into territory.

As Mark Bonta and John Protevi put it, striation "results from stratification, the overcoding, centralization, hierarchization, binarization, and segmentation" of free 23 movement (151).30 It is organizations such as the state that delineate space in such a way that it can be controlled and occupied from a hierarchic center or top. Molecular or lines of supple segmentation are somewhat less visible then molar lines. They are processes on the level of "micropolitics," less perceptible "fine segmentations" and "tiny cracks"

(196). While these lines work by processes of deterritorializing the structure of the molar lines on the level of micropolitics, they permit reterritorialization, bend the order without completely destroying it (see also Parr 145). It is only the processes associated with the third kind of line, that is, with lines of flight, which escape all segmentation. The line of flight "no longer tolerates segments" but rather is "like an exploding of the two segmentary series" (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 197). It thus brings into being something new that does not fit within the given structure - neither as a part of it nor as a dichotomous other to it. Hence, by transcending the segmentary lines that are overcoded by the dualism and order of an abstract machine employed by the organizations of power, lines of flight denote those process that actually change the logic of the segments themselves.

It is important to note that lines of flight are always immanent, part of the rhizome, because for Deleuze and Guattari there is never an outside. The line of flight does not transcend the rhizome and thereby replicate a logic of exclusion, "a dualism or a dichotomy" (9) of inside and outside. Rather, it ensures that rhizomes are a multiplicity.

Multiplicity denotes that there is no unity of structure or a 'One' that serves as a "pivot"

30 The wide array of philosophical traditions and political dimensions of Deleuze and Guattari's spatial concepts cannot be explored in the limited space of a dissertation focused on Berlin literatures of migrations. For cogent, in-depth analyses of Deleuze and Guattari's spatial theories, see Bonta's and Protevi's Deleuze and Geophilosophy, Rajchman's The Deleuze Connections, Brian Massumi's A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, or several essays on space in Ian Buchanan's A Deleuzian Century and Deleuze and Space. 24 around which all other added things are turning (8). In other words, the concept of multiplicity goes beyond the idea of the multiple, that is, of adding one and one in order to achieve the unitary sum of two.31 The multiple allows for unity or normative structures to be imposed upon and overcode it in a "supplementary dimension" (9). Multiplicities, on the other hand, are "flat" and "are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities" (9). Because of this immanent quality of the rhizome, lines of flight are inherently susceptible to self-destruct:

You may make a rupture [of the segmentary lines], draw a line of flight,

yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that

restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier ... -

anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups

and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. (9-10)

Deleuze and Guattari also call a multiplicity a "smooth" as opposed to a striated space.

Smooth space is "non-metric, acentered, rhizomatic" (371), thus a space of becoming rather than progress (486). Because controlling entails overcoding and thus striating space, smooth space cannot be controlled - there is no empty dimension that leaves room for such controlling. In striated space, movement, trajectories, and lines are subordinated to points, since one goes from one point to another, the distances between which can be measured, assessed, controlled, and owned (478-9). Smooth space, on the other hand, subordinates points to the trajectory. Deleuze and Guattari invoke the example of nomads, for whom the tent as a dwelling is subordinated to their trajectory. Moreover,

31 Deleuze and Guattari draw on the example of a horse's movement as an example for a multiplicity. Even though this movement can be divided into gallop, trot, and walk, "what is divided changes in nature at each moment of division" (ATP 483). 25

while nomads also go from one point to another, the points are not predetermined but

given by events (479). Smooth space's orientations and landmarks are constantly changing. For instance, in the desert or steppe, points of orientation "are not constant but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and precipitation" (493).

Just as the various lines outlined above are interdependent, continually

influencing and changing each other, the smooth and striated spaces they create cannot be

thought of separately from each other. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari find that "the

city is the striated space par excellence" whereas the sea is exemplary of a smooth space

(481). However, the town as a force of striation can striate the sea, for instance, by

occupying it with its navy or by fixing routes on nautical charts (387). At the same time,

there are also smooth spaces arising from within the city itself:

The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of world-wide

organization, but also of counterattack combining the smooth and the

holey, and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting

shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric,

patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no

longer even relevant. An explosive misery secreted by the city. ...

Condensed force, the potential for counterattack? (481)

It is easy to read this passage as threatening. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari argue that

smooth space is not necessarily "liberatory" (500). It is also not the space in which

striation is counter-acted (Bonta and Protevi 145). Instead, smooth space can always be

appropriated by "diabolical powers of organization" (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 480).

For instance, a submarine escapes the striations of the sea by going under the radar, and 26 thus potentially invents a "neonomadism" that is even more dangerous than the initial striation of the sea by the State (480). In a time of global satellite surveillance, which does not have to heed state borders or any other lines of segmentation, smooth spaces are in fact created "in the strangest of reversals [...] for the purpose of controlling striated space more completely" (480).

Building on the spatial theories of Deleuze and Guattari, I would argue that the current phenomenon of globalization can be conceptualized in terms of a smooth space in the service of such "diabolical powers" (530). Rosi Braidotti, drawing on a variety of globalization scholars, gives a useful summary definition of globalization:

[I]t is one of the distinctive traits of advance capitalism (Beck 1992,

1999); it extends beyond the nation-states (Giddens 1994; Dahrendorf

1990; Appadurai 1994); it is head-less and centre-less, yet hegemonic

(Grewal and Kaplan 1994); mobile and flexible, yet fixed and very local

(Sassen 1994); inherently violent and ruthless, thus prone to self-

destruction (Dahrendorf 1990); as a system, it is illogical and without an

end-point, aiming only at self-perpetuation (Negri 1981). (Transpositions

31)

32 For Germany, the question surrounding globalization has come somewhat belatedly. One could say that there are two important reasons for this: First, in contrast to nations such as Great Britain, whose extensive experience as a colonial empire links to issues of globalization, Germany has a relatively insular self-understanding, perceiving itself as a "homogenous, self-contained national space" that is threatened by one of the most dominant effects of globalization, i.e., "denationalization" (Beck, Globalization 14). Second, as aforementioned, the question of what constitutes the German nation has preoccupied Germany ever since reunification. Thus, the inevitable discussion of how Germany will confront the de-nationalization brought about by Europeanization and globalization has been delayed (15). However, as the preceding discussion surrounding German citizenship and Leitkultur implies, central questions posed by globalization concerning issues such as tolerance, cultural difference, or universal human Enlightenment ideals in face of what could be conceived of as the threat of globalization as well as Europeanization by now also have taken center-stage. 27

Globalizing forces operate in smooth space, without a center and end-point, beyond national borders and their striated spaces. Transgressing lines of segmentarity, escaping the control of national governments, the powers of a global capitalism are more threatening than state powers, because they are much less transparent and defined (see also Terkessidis 220). Resistance to forces of global homogenization and consumer culture is thus quasi aimless and therefore harder to direct. In a world of global capitalism, media, and surveillance, migration itself is no longer merely a sign of transgression, freedom, and mobility as suggested, for example, by Otmar Ette. As

Braidotti points out, "global migration is a molar line of segmentation or reterritorialization" since the "global city [mobility] and refugee camps [complete loss of mobility] are not dialectical or moral opposites: they are two sides of the same global coin" (Transpositions 60). Paradoxically, globalization simultaneously furthers mobility and imprisonment, empowerment and disenfranchisement. If neither the striated nation space nor the smooth space now occupied by globalism allows for a space for resistance, the question to be answered is where and how such a space can be created.

The answer partly seems to rest in what is now termed the process of glocalization. The term denotes the fact that there is a local integration of global processes which produces glocal phenomena specific to the local realities. Put differently, glocalization describes "the interpenetration of the global and the local resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas" (Ritzer 73). The distribution and accessibility of global commodities and ideas is appropriated by groups, communities and individuals to "fashion distinct and ever-changing realities and identities" on an unprecedented scale (75). In essence, then, glocalization theories stress "diversity, 28 hybridity, and independence" (75) over the homogenizing forces of "capitalism,

Americanization, and McDonaldization" (73), and maintain that processes of globalization are ambiguous. As Ulrich Beck points out, "globalization also involves a process of localization" whereby local cultures have to reconceptualise themselves in a global context, which constitutes a "non-traditionalist renaissance of the local" (Beck,

Globalization 45, 47). Beck sees this process of non-traditionalist localism in opposition and as an alternative to a fundamentalist reassertion of tradition by traditional means.

However, it is exactly this fundamentalist reassertion of tradition which is hard to oppose. While the processes of glocalization allow for a syncretic adaptation and thus for the undermining of hegemonic global tendencies, the desire to resist homogenization also furthers the development of "a new neoprimitivism, a new tribal society" (Deleuze and

Guattari, ATP 360), such as Muslim fundamentalist resistance fashioned in the name of anti-Westernization or fundamentalist Christian training camps in the name of anti­ terrorism. This poses the question of whether the forces of globalization and localization leave a space where lines of flight and smooth spaces do not turn into microfascisms or become restriated. The literary texts I have chosen to analyse in this dissertation are thus engaged in a process of finding or creating such spaces for resisting both homogenisation and fundamentalism by means of creating what Deleuze and Guattari call "holey space."

In A Thousand Plateaus "holey space" (espace troue), perhaps the most elusive of

Deleuze and Guattari's spatial categories, emerges as an alternative to lines of flight.

Such an alternative seems necessary considering that lines of flight do not allow a definite space of refuge and resistance. First, as mentioned above, lines of flight are always liable to re-encounter stratification, to reterriorialize in microfascism. Second, 29 lines of flight may end up in a state of suspense similar to that outlined by Adelson's critique of the in-between. For Deleuze and Guattari, the line of flight or nomad line that describes a smooth space is:

a line that delimits nothing, that describes no contour, that no longer goes

from one point to another but instead passes between points ..., a mutant

line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or background,

beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation .... (ATP

498)

By virtue of its definition, a line of flight can never arrive, does not allow for a settling.

Holey space, on the other hand, is a place of - at least temporary - refuge.

For Deleuze and Guattari, holey spaces are created by metallurgists. The metallurgist or artisan is an "itinerant, because he follows the matter-flow of the subsoil"

(412). Following the flow of metal, he proceeds like a carver who surrenders to the piece of wood's qualities such as growth ring marks or porosity rather than imposing a preconceived form on it. Quoting French art historian Elie Faure, Deleuze and Guattari allude to the metallurgists of India who drill their way through a mountain, not by exacting "the affirmation of a determined ideal from form" but rather by following the indentations and accidents of the rock itself (413). Thus, metallurgists do not impose order on their surrounding space, they do not striate it. At the same time, they also do not merely traverse space like nomads. Rather, they:

Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them, excavate the land

instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth,

turn the earth into Swiss cheese. An image from the film Strike by 30

Eisenstein presents a holey space where a disturbing group of people are

arising, each emerging from his hole as if from a field mined in all

directions. (413)33

Deleuze and Guattari here refer to a still from Sergei Eisenstein's film Strike that captures a panoramic view of the Lumpenproletariat, an assembly of marginalized figures such as criminals, beggars, prostitutes, and midgets, as they are emerging from their homes in large barrels partly submerged upright in a waste field. In the film, the Lumpenproletariat is engaged by the capitalist factory owners in order to infiltrate the proletariat workers' demonstration and to turn the demonstration into a violent strike, which in turn justifies the authorities' violent suppression of the workers. The Lumpenproletariat thus does not belong to either the space of commodification represented by the capitalist bourgeoisie nor to that of the workers. This bizarre and unsettling scene haunts the film and, with the contemporary viewer's historical hindsight, foreshadows the fact that the proletariat's initially deterritorializing force will reterritorialize once it becomes revolutionary

Russia's new brutal authority. The Lumpenproletariat, waiting in its holes below ground, on the other hand, remains outside any system as a force that cannot be fully controlled by either the capitalist system or organized socialist revolution.

Deleuze and Guattari use this image to further illuminate the position of the metallurgist or mineur as a being of the subsoil who passes through both the striated land of sedentary space and the nomadic ground of smooth space (412,414). Because the metallurgist or miner passes through both striated and smooth space, he is in connection

33 Strike, Eisenstein's first full-length film, relates the story of a factory workers' strike in pre- revolutionary Russia, which is brutally suppressed by the government. The film is the first in a projected series of seven films to be made on the development of the worker's struggle (Sadoul 353). 31 with both of them. Working in mines, he is in contact with sedentary farmers, with the nomads who inhabit the land to be crossed in order to get to the mines, and with the empires that control and own the mines. Since the metallurgist thus is in communication with both smooth and sedentary space, he is a hybrid, in himself double, "an alloy, a twin formation" with a "twin progeny" (415). The holey space created and occupied by metallurgists is equally hybrid. Their space is "neither the striated space of the sedentary, nor the smooth space of the nomad"; rather, the metallurgists live "in the manner of a cave or a hole, a hut half or all underground" (413). Thus, what Deleuze and Guattari call the machinic phylum of metal, in which holey space is created, connects to both smooth and striated space:

On the side of the nomadic assemblages and war machines [i.e., forces of

smooth space], it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean

passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On the other side, the

sedentary assemblages and State apparatuses [i.e., forces of striated space]

effect a capture of the phylum, put the traits of expression into a form or a

code, make the holes resonate together, plug up the lines of flight,

subordinate the technological operation to the work model, impose upon

the connections a whole regime of arborescent conjunctions. (415)

That is, holey space can interact with smooth space by connecting to it rhizomatically as well as it can be reterritorialized and striated. What differentiates holey space from smooth space is that smooth space is marked by the eternal movement of lines of flight and by absolute deterritorialization, whereas holey space seems to offer a stopping point, a site of at least temporary rest in an "'ore bed' (gite, shelter, home, mineral deposit)" 32

(413). As Helene Frichot argues, despite the dangers of capture, Deleuze and Guattari's holey space is a place "where shelter is sought," "a provisional place of escape and refuge, for the time being" (177-8), and thus offers a "subterranean and hidden means of escape and resistance" (170). As Janelle Blankenship points out, holey space "points to a new networked mode of living and a subversion from below, rendering holey space a space of political intervention and interaction" (8), a "participatory realm, a realm of practice"(9). Holey space, therefore, in the midst of dominant structures, actively makes itself at home, offers refuge, and subverts not by imposing something completely new and foreign upon the received space, but by transforming that which is given, by following the metal flow.

Even though, or perhaps because, Deleuze and Guattari do not dwell on further developing the concept of holey space, its just-outlined schematic contours make it a fruitful starting point for further meditations on a space in which or from which the migrant can create a shelter in a globalized and Europeanized Berlin Republic. My project thus is guided by the question of what kind of holey spaces the literary texts in question drill, open up, and/or inhabit. That is, I am interested in whether the texts I have chosen constitute Deleuze and Guattari's litterature mineure, which I understand here not as a minor literature but rather as a literature of miners. How does this literature of miners escape assimilated integration and insertion into a striated Europe of nations based on a

EuroMyth, or into a Germany based on an exclusive memory culture? How do my authors manage to avoid depicting a Berlin getting lost in the smooth space of a Europe that has eradicated its internal borders and at the same time fortified its external 33 borders?34 And how are they able to "keep up the mines, boring holes in European space from every direction" and thus contribute to the constitution of new European spaces

(Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 414)?

34 By 2007, the Schengen Agreement has been agreed to by 28 states (Beck, Cosmopolitan 247). The Agreement not only abolished internal European border controls between those who signed the agreement but also reinforced Europe's external border controls via the Schengen Borders Code. 34

CHAPTER II. Yoko Tawada's Pulverschrift Berlin: Dislocating Europe

Journalist: (to Napoleon) Sie haben grob und global gehandelt. Sie haben ihren Blick in die Hohe des Horizontes gehalten und Grenzen zwischen Landera iiberschritten, um ihre Land- karte zu erweitern. Ein Pionier. Ein Kosmopolit. Ein Held. Eigentlich wollten Sie so etwas wie die EU griinden, nehme ich an. (Tawada, Pulverschrift 103)35

At first sight, Yoko Tawada's work seems to be essentially about dislocation, marked by an ethereal atmosphere in which meanings, identities, and places are in a state of constant metamorphosis. However, as I argue in the ensuing discussion of Tawada's writings on

Berlin and Europe, the specificity of place, in this case of Berlin, matters significantly.

While Tawada questions Europe as a striated space with fixed geographical and cultural borders, I proceed by arguing that she does not celebrate it uncritically as a smooth space of globalization and free-floating nomads. Rather, I show that she acknowledges the specific history permeating Berlin's parks and streets, and unearths its Prussian past in order to illuminate Berlin's, Germany's, and Europe's present. Her Berlin writings thus mark and create holey spaces allowing for spatio-temporal oscillations between past and present, East and West, the local, the European, and the global.

35 'You acted abrasively and globally. You have kept your eyes on the horizon and crossed borders between countries in order to enlarge your map. A pioneer. A cosmopolitan. A hero. In a sense, you wanted to found something like the European Union, I suppose. 35

Tawada and Migration

Before turning my attention to Tawada's holey Berlin, I will detail the position of

Tawada's work in the context of the literature of migration and thereby also situate my

main text, Pulverschrift Berlin, in the context of her writing more generally. As Sigrid

Weigel has pointed out, Tawada's writing is an uneasy fit with the term

Migrationsliteratur ("Literatur" 204, 225). Tawada herself also emphasizes that she does

not see herself as part of a literature of migration supposedly participating in the kind of

intercultural dialogue critiqued in the introduction to this dissertation. To Tawada, the

German expression "eine Briicke schlagen" (building a bridge), which literally translated

could also mean 'hitting' a bridge, is as inherently violent as the hyphen that binds two

supposedly separate worlds into a static state that cannot be metamorphosed (Tawada, "I

do not" 416). Migrationsliteratur is also an inappropriate label for Tawada's work

because it groups it with that of authors of other ethnicities, such as the Turkish-German

community, which arises from a very different socio-economic and historical

background. With only about 30,000 residents of Germany with Japanese citizenship, the

Japanese minority in Germany is small, especially when compared to others such as the

Turkish (over 1.7 million) or Italian (over 530,000) ones (BAMF, "Migrationsbericht"

307-8). Moreover, unlike the Turkish or Italian presence, that of the Japanese is not the

result of labour migration and has no connection to the wave of guest workers of the

1960s and 70s, which inspired the early literature of, for instance, the Turkish minority.

Rather, Japanese migration has been mainly motivated by foreign trade politics after

Germany had become a destination for Japanese trade in the 1980s. By the mid-90s,

Germany was Japan's most important European trade partner, which resulted in the 36 migration of middle and upper-class Japanese individuals to Germany (Thranhardt 243-

44). The situation of the Japanese also differs significantly from that of many other non-

European Union immigrants in that Japanese immigrants generally come to Germany in order to work for a Japanese company and thus do not face issues such as obtaining a work or residence permit. Japan's particular status is also evidenced by the fact that it is exempted from the ban on labour recruitment implemented in 1973 (BAMF,

"Migrationsbericht" 80).36

Tawada comments on this generally privileged status of Japanese residents in

Germany by drawing attention to the fact that the situation of the Vietnamese in Germany is rather different. In "In Front of Trang Tien Bridge," Tawada for instance cites a pamphlet allegedly published by the Japanese community in Berlin, which advises the

Japanese in Germany to "always wear glasses and neckties. Women should put on as much jewellery as possible, and be sure to carry a brand-name handbag" in order to

"avoid cases of mistaken identity," that is to not be mistaken for Vietnamese (Tawada,

Facing 55).37 Tawada herself belongs to a privileged class of immigrants. She was born in Tokyo in 1960, and decided to move to Hamburg in 1982, living in Berlin since 2006.

After studying Russian literature in Japan, Tawada proceeded to study German literature

36 Citizens of Andorra, Australia, Israel, Japan, Canada, Monaco, New Zealand, San Marino and the U.S. are exempt from the recruitment ban (§ 9 ASAV and § 34 BeschV, BAMF 80). Such a >Meistbegiinstigungsklausel,, easing Japanese economic settlements in Germany, has been in effect since 1927 (Thranhardt 245). 37 Tawada repeatedly references the Vietnamese presence in Germany. For instance, her short story "In Front of Trang Tien Bridge" focuses on a Japanese-Berlin woman, who is often mistaken for a Vietnamese, and her journey to Vietnam. Tawada's novel Das Nackte Auge relates the story of a young Vietnamese student who travels to East Berlin, from where she moves on to West Germany and France. Tawada thus pays her dues to the fact that between 1980 and 1990, the German Democratic Republic had imported over 71,000 low-skilled guest-workers from mostly Vietnam, a large part of whom were employed in East Berlin (Mushaben 321). Unfortunately, I was not able to find German-language Berlin fiction written by Vietnamese- Germans. 37 in Hamburg and defended her dissertation under Sigrid Weigel in 2000. Tawada is a prolific writer of essays, prose, drama, and poetry in both German and Japanese and the recipient of various prestigious literary prizes in both countries.38 Given the nature both of the Japanese presence in Germany and Tawada's own voluntary move, which was not necessitated by political, economic, or family circumstances (Esselborn 241), it is not surprising that Tawada's work is generally not concerned with themes typical of

Betroffenheitsliteratur (literature of the affected). In contrast to writers such as Emine

Sevgi Ozdamar, whose Die Briicke vom Goldenen Horn overtly thematizes the pain involved in political exile and the guest worker situation,39 or Feridun Zaimoglu, whose

Kanak Sprak bluntly and angrily addresses racial and economic discrimination, Tawada's writing is more focused on themes such as translation, travel, and transit.

That is not to say that Tawada eschews addressing issues such as racial discrimination and stereotyping, language difficulties, or cultural alienation. As Bernard

Banoun concurs, Tawada is "[f]ar from ignoring the difficulties of an immigrant-emigre"

(133). However, she pays attention to these issues by abstaining from victimizing her predominantly Asian protagonists. For instance, in the short story "Worter, die in der

Asche schlafen," the protagonist is hit by the spit of a biker.40 Even though the protagonist is deeply disturbed by the rotten smell of the spit on her head, she is apparently more concerned about why this "bose Tat" (evil deed), quite obviously motivated by racism, was not accompanied by a verbal insult, because without words, the

38 For instance, she was awarded the Akutagawa-Prize in 1993, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, the Sei-Ito Prize for Literature in 2003, and was honoured with the Goethe Medal in 2005. 39 The Bridge of the Golden Horn 40 'Words sleeping in the ashes' 38 act was "allein und wirkungslos" (Tawada, Uberseezungen 20).41 That is, while the smell of the spit on her head is overpowering and very unpleasant, the protagonist denies it the power to do her any real harm. In the end, the protagonist is inclined to pity the biker, imagining that he has to lead his daily life with such a vile smell on his tongue (21). As a result, the aggressor becomes the victim. This is rather typical of Tawada's writing, which, as Petra Fachinger observes, is not concerned with social issues such as assimilation on account of her unique diasporic condition ("Cultural" 46).

As most critics have observed, Tawada's work focuses rather on fantastic, surreal, or mythological themes and on issues such as the haptic nature of language or the problematics of translation. Given that many of Tawada's themes relate to travel, dislocation, and transnational movements, Christina Kraenzle argues that the label travel writing may be more adequate and productive for Tawada's oeuvre ("Limits of Travel"

260). Taking slightly different approaches, Ruth Kersting's book Fremdes Schreiben

(Foreign writing) classifies Tawada's writing as part of contemporary postmodern

German literature; in Global Playing in der Literatur, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis calls it a

"Neue Weltliteratur;" and Ottmar Ette views it as a prime example of a "Literatur ohne festen Wohnsitz" (Literature without fixed abode) ("Uber die Briicke" 169).

Despite these legitimate claims to demarcate Tawada's writing from a German- language literature of migration, the inclusion of her work in a dissertation such as this is warranted given that her writing adds a unique perspective to contemporary German language writing on the subject of Berlin and/in Europe. For instance, as Bettina Brandt points out, Tawada's texts are marked by several characteristics of surrealism: an explicitly anti-national character, an apparently autobiographical first person narrator

41 'alone and without effect' 39 who often finds herself in a dream-like state, the conscious use of the narrative perspective of a child and the accompanying astonished view, the use of montage, an emphasis on the materiality of language, and scepticism and a heightened sensibility towards language (Brandt, "Schnitt" 75). Surrealism never developed a strong presence in Germany and is therefore still regarded as .foreign' or explicitly non-German (74).

Tawada's surrealist German language writing speaks to this void by reminding us of a small but vibrant tradition of German surrealism and by continuing that tradition. More importantly, surrealism also supports Tawada's refusal to represent anyone or anything, the surrealist image itself not being a representation (Abbild) (76). For an author such as

Tawada, surrealism thus offers a means by which to escape the cultural and national connotations attributed to her work and person, ensuring that her work is not representative of any supposed authentic cultural or national identity (76). While this may work in favour of the above outlined argument that Tawada cannot be counted as part of a literature of migration, it also becomes apparent that her writing does share in one of the major concerns of this literature, which is to not be reduced to a sociological case study.

Thus, Tawada is included in this dissertation, which argues along the lines of Esselborn that even though Tawada's literature has much in common with world literature, it is still too concerned with the issues surrounding migration and the Other to be counted as part of merely a postmodern European genre (261-2).

European Japan and Japanese Berliners

To grasp the importance of Berlin and Germany in Tawada's oeuvre requires an understanding of her conceptualization of Europe. Tawada's Europe is certainly not 40 bound by geographical borders and does not constitute a striated territory in the

Deleuzean sense. Tawada's contribution "An der Spree" in the 2003 anthology Es liegt was in der Luft: Die Himmel Europas, begins with the sentence: "Ich bin in Europa, ich weiB nicht wo ich bin" (111).42 The theme of Europe as a vague and undetermined location and concept permeates all of Tawada's writing. In her short story "Wo Europa anfangt," published in 1991, the protagonist takes the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Europe but fails to ever determine where the Europe she is trying to reach begins. For instance, one character in the story claims that everything beyond the Urals is Europe, while a

French fellow passenger finds the notion that Moscow belongs to Europe ridiculous (Wo

Europa 82-3).43 In Pulverschrift Berlin, the character of Napoleon, on the other hand, includes Russia in Europe and considers everything beyond Russia to be non-European

(Pulverschrift 103).

Tawada's writings about East and West follow the same de-territorializing logic.

Once she finds herself at the river Spree in Berlin, she contemplates how she used to think that the Middle East was close to Europe, but now knows that: "Der Nahe Osten war nicht so fern dem Fernen Osten, wie man im Fernen Osten gedacht hatte" ("An der

Spree" 111).44 Tawada points out that East and West, designations that have permeated political thought during the pre-colonial, colonial, and Cold War area, are arbitrary and vague signifiers. For instance, for a child from Asia, America is "im Osten hinter dem

Meer" rather than the essence of the West (Wo Europa 81).45 Similarly, considering that

42 'I am in Europe, I don't know where I am.' 43 For a detailed analysis of "Wo Europa anfangt", see Kari van Dijk's article "Arriving in Euroasia: Yoko Tawada Re-Writing Europe". 44 'The Near East was not as far from the Far East as one had thought in the Far East'. 45 'in the East, behind the sea' 41 in the "wirkliche" (real) West, that is in California, a third of the IT employees are East

Indian, the true West is actually determined by the true East, rather than the other way around ("An der Spree" 120). Tawada points to the subjective nature of East and West, the location of which obviously depends on the viewer's standpoint, which subverts power relations between the two. Moreover, she suggests that the East is not Europe's external but rather its internal Other. When told by a character in the short story "Leipzig des Lichts und der Gelatine" that the best way to get to Leipzig from Berlin is with a bus to Istanbul, the narrator is worried that she may cross the Marmara bridge over to Asia, and therefore may wake up "auBerhalb Europas" in case she were to fall asleep on the bus

(Wo Europa 15).46 That is, even though she wants to go to the (former) East, the East is not outside or beyond Europe, not necessarily simply to be found on the other side of the

European continent.

As becomes clear in Pulverschrift Berlin, the boundaries of a European culture are as vague as those of its territory. Both historically and within the play, Mori Ogai is a later 19th-century Japanese medical doctor, translator, author, and, as Tawada puts it, a pilgrim through European literary history (.Pulverschrift 107). Ogai, upon request from the Japanese military, studied hygiene in Prussian Germany from 1884-88 and significantly contributed to the importing of both medical and literary Prussian modernity to Japan. Individuals such as he shaped Japan's partly Prussian modernization, which was inscribed most evidently in Japan's constitution and military system. According to the character of the Korean student, Korea also had to become Prussian following Japan's adaptations of Prussian elements:

46 'Leipzig of Light and Gelatine'; 'outside of Europe' 42

Wenn es keine PreuBen gegeben hatte, gabe es keine Japaner. Es ware viel

besser gewesen. Aber da es Japaner gab, die preuBisch waren, mussten wir

alle preuBisch werden. Sonst hatten die Japaner als die einzigen PreuBen in

Asien uns weiter an der Nase herumgefiihrt. (105)47

However, this Prussian-European culture is markedly Japanese. In her essay "Eigentlich darf man es niemandem sagen, aber Europa gibt es nicht,"48 Tawada ironically suggests that the Japanese see themselves as being more European than the Europeans. For them,

Europe is easily imitable; and, since the culture that excels in imitating European culture is the best culture, Japan is more European and therefore superior to any European country (Talisman 49).

While also constituting a critique of Japanese nationalism, this example of

Japanese eurocentrism effectively disconnects the word 'Europe' from any geographical, cultural, or political signified. In the same way in which there is no geographical entity with distinct borders that can be called Europe, European culture is not fastened to a specific ethnicity, history, or religion. As the character of the journalist points out,

Napoleon's rant against women in politics, such as Luise, makes him sound like an

"islamistischer Fundamentalist" (99), something 'our' (read: European) man ought not to be. The borders between Asian, Islamist, and European values are apparently not as impermeable as some would like them to be; the idea of a Leitkultur may in fact be quite misleading.49 In Opium fur Ovid Tawada similarly shows that the concept of culture in general is a construct. The narrator relates what seems to be a dream, in which she fails

47 'If there had been no Prussians, there would have been no Japanese. That would have been a lot better. But since there were Japanese, who were Prussian, we all had to become Prussian. Otherwise, the Japanese, as the only Prussians in Asia, would have continued to mess with us.' 48 'One should not tell anyone, but Europe does not exist.' 49 See page 14-5 for a detailed discussion of the term Leitkultur. 43 an oral exam on the theme of culture. She is accused of fabricating a fantasy land, to which the narrator replies in defence: "Historiker machen doch auch nichts anderes als sich Fantasielander auszudenken" (68).50 Switching from the exam to a scene in which the narrator sits on a toilet bowl, she contemplates what the bottom of Europe could be if the Euro is its head. Tawada seems to suggest that even though the Euro has solidified an economic entity called Europe, Europe as a cultural entity may not be much more than a

'Po' (buttocks). Therefore, Tawada's narrator in "An der Spree" finds it hard to determine what a European ought to be. When a police officer assumes that she is a tourist, she tells him: '"Ich bin keine Touristin, ich bin eine...' Da wuBte ich nicht mehr weiter. [...] Einer, der einen amerikanischen Pass hat, ist ein Amerikaner, aber einer, der einen europaischen PaB hat, ist nicht unbedingt ein Europaer" (113).51

Opposition to the striated space of a Europe of nations and to a cohesive culture and identity are in line with Tawada's thinking about national and ethnic identity in general. Her writing is not concerned with roots or identity politics. In Opium fur Ovid one of Tawada's female characters Coronis is asked why she does not read Nabokov, since she is after all "aus dem Osten" (91).52 Noticing that Coronis is taking offence and in an attempt to include the former East within Europe, her dialogue partner suggests that she ought at least to read European literary canonical figures such as Joyce or Musil, since she is after all European. Rejecting any kind of filiations based on blood lineage and territorially determined identity, Coronis rejects this demand answering: "Ich mochte

50 'Historians also do not do anything but to conceive of fantasy countries.' 51 'I am not a tourist. I am a...' There, I did not know how to continue. [...] Someone who has an American passport is an American, but one, who has a European passport, is not necessarily a European.' 52 'from the East' keinen GroBvater haben.... Ich mochte keine Vorfahren haben und keine Nachkommen zeugen" (Opium fur Ovid 91).53 This rejection of origins and roots also becomes clear

when the narrator of "Wo Europa anfangt" remarks that some fellow travelers threw

"Luftschlangen" overboard when they left home by ship, which metamorphosed into

umbilical cords, symbolizing the "letzte Verbindung zwischen den Passagieren und ihren

Geliebten" (Wo Europa 68).54 Banoun therefore argues that, for Tawada, the idea that

"some great potency is to be found in a sense of rootedness in a particular place and that

there are benefits to be drawn from this umbilical connection" is illusory (127).

While Tawada undeniably rejects any easy "junction of culture and identity" and

accompanying notions such as "rootedness, stasis, and fixity," which were so aptly critiqued by Paul Gilroy (18), and while she does argue against a territorial Europe based

on blood, lineage and genealogy, her work does not constitute a complete rejection of

these values. Apparently commenting on her poem "Touristen," Tawada clarifies herself

by alluding to the myth of the abduction of Europe and the notion that the European

Union was created in response to the Shoah: "Als ich in einem Gedicht schrieb, dass es

Europa nicht gibt, meinte ich auf keinen Fall, dass sie verlorengegangen sei. Ich wollte

eher behaupten, dass Europa bereits im Ursprung als eine Verlust-Figur erfunden wurde"

(„Eigentlich" 49).55 However, despite the impossiblity of Europe, which according to

Tawada neither was nor will be, "Touristen" ends with the verse: "Eigentlich darf man es

nicht laut sagen/ aber wir konnen/ ohne [den Baum Europa] schon nicht mehr Leben"

53 'I don't want to have a grandfather.... I don't want ancestors and I don't want any descendents'; Kersting points out that Tawada's work itself of course borrows from a Western grandfather (Ovid) and an Eastern grandmother (Sei Shonagon) (202). 54 'symbolizing the last connection between the passengers and their loved ones' 55 'When I wrote in a poem that Europe does not exist, I did by no means mean that it was lost. I rather wanted to say that Europe was, from its very inception, invented as a figure of loss.' 45

(Nur da wo du bist 124).56 That is, even though Europe may not exist, we need to presuppose its existence.

In a related manner, when interpreting the above cited passage from "Wo Europa anfangt," any celebration of rootlessness and lineage is contrary to the sentiment conveyed at the end of the story. There, the letter M of Moscow, the city the protagonist finally has arrived in, becomes 'mother' who "gebar mich noch einmal in meinem

Bauch" (86).57 While the protagonist here essentially also gives birth to her mother in her own belly and therefore disrupts any straight genealogy, it is still her mother who also gives birth to the protagonist. Thus, maternal ties are not severed. In fact, it is only after the letter A (of Moskau in German) transforms into a biblical apple eaten by the protagonist, that her mother disappears and the protagonist notices that she is standing

"mitten in Europa," where it is colder than it had ever been in Siberia (87).58 This part of the story has been read as the narrator's final, complete separation from her former country, language, and self, as a precondition of her arrival in Europe. For instance,

Kersting argues that the scene is like a baptism, a re-birth, due to which all the old pictures and stories, which are once more conjured up in a final firework of letters, make room for new ones (114). However, the narrator has already arrived in Moscow before eating the apple. Where she has not yet arrived is in the political Moscow represented by the immigration officer who wants to send her back because her visa has expired

(Tawada, Wo Europa 86). It is only then that the protagonist drinks from the forbidden water and eventually notices that she is standing in a cold Europe. Standing in the middle

56 'One should not say it out loud, but we are already no longer able to survive without [the tree Europe].' 57 'gave birth to me once more in my belly' 58 'in the midst of Europe' 46 of Europe, therefore, is preceded by a fall rather than a rebirth: a fall from the maternal womb to a cold city and from conceiving of the world as a watery globe to recognizing the predominance of solid matter and its borders. To find oneself in the midst of Europe, to be able to arrive and name that Europe, is therefore not intrinsically connected to severing all ties to genealogy and territory. It is only the disavowal of certain kinds of genealogies, roots, and by extension territories, that leads to a loss of warmth and connection. As will become more apparent below, other kinds of roots and places are retained.

Berlin Matters

At this point, it has become obvious that Tawada's Europe is not simply a smooth space.

As Kraenzle convincingly argues, 'Tawada suggests that the notion of a world without borders is fallacious: her focus on language and territoriality presents a world where linguistic boundaries remain intact and regionalisms and nationalisms flourish" ("Limits"

244). Banoun also points out that Tawada's work resists any "hazy horizons of

'globalization'" or the danger of "evaporating into some illusory global village" (133). In fact, most of her protagonists are very aware of the concrete bodily and linguistic consequences of crossing borders and boundaries. Tawada's oeuvre thus opposes the figure of the Deleuzean nomad as he is championed by, for example, Rosi Braidotti.

Braidotti uses Deleuze and Guattari's nomadic thinking in order to further what she calls a nomadic consciousness, which leads to a celebration of non-places, such as airports, as

"[o]ases of non-belonging, spaces of detachment. No-(wo)man's lands" (Nomadic 10). I certainly do not want to argue against Braidotti's overall argument, which calls for 47 multiple, rhizomatic relocalizations to follow dislocation. However, it is at times questionable how Braidotti imagines this relocation to take place in smooth space. Her airport, a symbol of transit, becomes in Tawada's work a "Ort, von dem aus [sie] nirgendwohin abfliegen konnte" (Das Nackte Auge 128),59 because the protagonist is detained on account of a forged passport. Without a residence permit or linguistic proficiency, national borders are very concrete. Tawada's characters do not remain suspended in a nomadic situation but arrive by making themselves at home in a Europe and its languages.

Place matters, and in Pulverschrift Berlin, Berlin and the Berlin Republic are central. Paying particular attention to Tawada's Berlin writings thus corrects Yildiz's assessment that "Germany, for example, does not seem to play any role as a national context, but is subsumed under 'Europe,'" which Yildiz furthermore calls "a phantasmatic site of greater importance in [Tawada's] work" (85). Doug Slaymaker similarly argues that even though most of Tawada's narrators are from Japan, "they exist in a contemporary 'place' without concrete referent; it could be any of a number of cities, or perhaps none" (46). Both critics' assessments of the incorporeal, a-geographical nature of Tawada's countries and cities are adequate to a certain extent. As argued above,

Tawada is indeed not interested in territorial and striated places. Moreover, doubt as to the significance of named geographical locations arises from many of her works. For instance, the Moscow in "Wo Europa anfangt," is equated with a "Zauberwort" and a

"Traumstadt" (79).60 It is the city "in der man nie ankommt" (75).61 Rather than dreaming

59 'a place from which [she] could fly nowhere' 60 'magic word'; 'city of dreams/ dream city' 61 'in which one never arrives' 48 of arriving in Moscow, the narrator's mother, for instance, would have preferred Siberia to be endless (79). The city is often not depicted as a concrete location but rather as the embodiment of her parents' Utopian and communist ideals. Having been infected with

"der roten Krankheit" (72)62 after WWII but apparently disillusioned by communism by the 1970s, Moscow symbolizes Utopian desires, a city the centre of which is no longer the

Red Square but an imagined never-ending novel (79).63

At first glance, one could also argue that the Tiergarten and the Berlin it represents in Pulverschrift Berlin are phantasmagoric sites. The characters call it a

"Zaubergarten" and the coming alive of figures such as Napoleon and Ogai obviously adds to its oneiroid atmosphere (Pulverschrift 98).64 However, this dreamlike feel is in part conditioned by influences from No theatre, outlined by Brazell and Araki.

Pulverschrift is subtitled "1. Fur Luise," even though this first part is never followed by a second one. Rather, the first part itself is divided in two. Tawada here references the conventions of No drama, which sometimes has one but usually two acts. By letting historical figures appear in conversation with contemporary Berlin residents,

Pulverschrift also leans on N5 theatre, in which spirits or ghosts appear next to ordinary people whose experiences are, however, usually extraordinary. Finally, the dream-like atmosphere of Pulverschrift reminds of what Brazell and Araki identify as the No theatre's characteristic borrowing from dreams and visions (10). For example, the 21st- century journalist is not in the least surprised about meeting Napoleon in the Tiergarten,

62 'the red disease' 63 Kersting points out that Tawada here comments on the Japanese neo-Marxism and West- European intellectuals' fascination with China in the postwar decades (120). 64 'enchanted garden' 49 just as dream logic tends to accept all events in dreams as entirely natural.65 The fantastic nature of Pulverschrift should therefore be attributed to its affinity to No theatre rather than being interpreted as the author's attempt to dislocate the Tiergarten as a setting.

Instead of calling Tawada's Europe, Germany, and Berlin phantasmagoric sites and thus agreeing with the assessment that specific locations such as Germany do not play any significant role in Tawada's writing, it seems more appropriate to call them holey spaces. This becomes most obvious in a detailed reading of Pulverschrift Berlin.

The drama is constituted by a conversation between such diverse characters as a punk from Kreuzberg, a contemporary Berlin journalist, a former worker, a Japanese and a

South Korean exchange student, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), Heinrich von Kleist

(1777-1811), Mori Ogai (1862-1922), and Aoki Shuzo (1844-1914). These characters discuss a variety of themes such as the health benefits of Zori sandals, Napoleon's hatred and Kleist's admiration for Queen Luise of Prussia (1770-1810), Luise's symbolic importance for the wars of independence, the proper use of chopsticks, the modernization of Japan, or Napoleon's lack of bodily hygiene. Doing so, they cite not always readily identifiable passages from Kleist's poems and Napoleon's Bulletins (1805-15), and they allude to contemporary dailies detailing the lives of the British royal family or to works such as Ogai's Dai hakken [A great discovery] (1909) and Yokomitsu Riichi's

Napoleon's Ringworm (1926).

The drama's setting is the Tiergarten in Berlin, and more specifically, the

Luiseninsel, a small fenced off section of the Tiergarten, in which one can find a late 19th

65 Founded in the mid-16th century, the Tiergarten, now a large park in the center of Berlin, was originally the hunting ground of the Brandenburg electorate. It was turned into a public garden by Frederick the Great and has survived as such throughout Berlin's turbulent history. For further information, see the Tiergarten entry on www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de. 50 century marble statue of Queen Luise of Prussia. On their way to the nearby train station

Bahnhof Zoo,66 a Japanese and a South Korean exchange student are enticed by a former worker to go see Queen Luise and to engage in the Benjaminian "Kunst" of getting lost in this "Zaubergarten" (98) 67 Their meandering leads them to the statue of Queen Luise

(93). From then on, all of the play's action takes place around the statue, which is the only stage or prop direction given. Once more, this is partly attributable to the influence of the No theatre, which generally does not use sets but rather creates scenes by the use of only a few props, verbal description, and movements (Brazell and Araki 28). Thus, the mere fact that she is the only prop does not necessarily accord her any major significance.

However, since Luise also figures as the play's subtitle, her centrality can hardly be questioned. This becomes apparent when considering that Tawada's oeuvre, by means of emphasising the other senses, resists the - in the 20th century - dominant function of the optical (Genz 166). As Tawada herself states regarding her approach to Europe: "Ich

will Europa nicht mehr optisch, sondern mit meiner Zunge wahrnehmen [um so] vielleicht die Grenze zwischen Betrachter und Objekt [zu] iiberschreiten" (Talisman

50).68 Tawada partly elaborates on this rejection of the optical by claiming that Europe, in contrast to Japan, needs to be seen since it fears that "was nicht gesehen wird, jederzeit verschwinden kann" (47).69 She does not want to participate in this process of the affirmation of the self by virtue of being perceived, since that would render her own body

66 Bahnhof Zoo is the short form for: Bahnhof Berlin Zoologischer Garten. 67 Compare Benjamin: "Sich in einer Stadt nicht zurechtfinden heifit nicht viel. In einer Stadt sich aber zu verirren, wie man in einem Walde sich verirrt, braucht Schulung.... Diese Kunst habe ich spat erlernt" (Berliner Kindheit 237). 'To find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose ones way, just as one loses one's way in a forest, requires training. ... I acquired this art late.' 68 'I no longer want to perceive Europe optically, but with my tongue [in order to thus] perhaps cross the boundary between viewer and object.' 69 'what is not seen can disappear anytime' 51 into an object to be continually (re)constituted by the gaze of others (47), something to be formed from the outside. Vision banishes, controls, and striates the perceived, rendering it an object, which once more fortifies the border between self and perceived other. It allows the thus self-assured sovereign subject to appropriate a previous space as its place, as something delineated, a territory with borders.

The queen's statue, at the center of the action of Pulverschrift, however, does not allow one the illusion that one visually masters its totality. Rather, the observer is forced to walk around the statue, which is co-extensive with his or her space, and denies him or her the power to observe it in its entirety.70 One can only see one part at a time and thus, each perceived part depends on the specific physical location of the observer. This not only blurs the boundary between perceiver and perceived, subject and object, but also points to the temporal dimension involved in knowledge. What one perceives and thus seems to know changes from moment to moment while one is circling the statue.

Pulverschrift Berlin itself thus takes place "[j]etzt und keine Sekunde spater" (Tawada,

Pulverschrift 97),7' each performance allowing for a new play based on the specific given combination of time, place, actors, and audience. The statue at the center of the play therefore throws the subject back onto itself, makes him or her subjected to, and thus an object of, time and space, denying the modern subject any assumed sovereignty.

Like the statue, the borders of Tawada's Europe are not traceable by a sovereign, viewing subject. Yet, this does not necessarily entail that Europe cannot be perceived at all or does not exist. The way in which Europe exists merely depends on who sees it and when it is seen. Each Europe, which results from the interplay of perceiver and perceived

70 Compare Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes, page 61. 71 'now and not a second later' 52 at a given spatio-temporal moment, is therefore as real as each successively perceived side of the statue of Queen Luise. Looking at Tawada's portraits of Europe(s) in this manner forestalls criticism such as Anthonya Visser's, who finds that Tawada's Europe is mostly limited to Germany (116-7). Like Luise, Tawada's Germany functions like a hole in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Rather than a limit, it is a possibility, a location from which one can temporarily look at and describe Europe without thereby presupposing or fortifying a territorially and culturally stable Europe. In smooth and striated space, Europe at best does not exist, at worst becomes a fortress. Seen from a hole, Europe itself becomes holey.

Tawada's drama draws historical and imaginative circles around Luise to elaborate on her significance for Berlin's and Europe's present, thereby mimicking the character of a South Korean exchange student who uses washing powder to write a

Korean translation of Kleist's poems to Luise around her statue. The characters' discussion of Napoleon's dreams of expansion, which were vehemently opposed by the historical Luise, for example, raises questions as to the nature of the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union in 2004. Tawada playfully probes whether this expansion is any better founded than Napoleon's conquest of Europe, alluding to a historical satire by

Yokomitsu Riichi, called Napoleon's Ringworm (1926), which claims that Napoleon's will to expansion was driven by madness resulting from a severely itching ringworm rash

(Campbell 33).72 Comparison with Napoleon's version of a united Europe questions whether the Eastern Enlargement constitutes a colonization of Eastern Europe rather than a union. Giving voice to a more general feeling that the expansion constitutes a kind of

72 Campbell calls Yokomitsu's satires of this nature "historical fantasies, in which deterministic forces other than economics are imagined as the ultimate mechanisms of history" (30). 53 colonialization of Eastern Europe, Merje Kuus for example theorizes the enlargement in terms of postcolonial theory, arguing that the enlargement is "underpinned by a broadly orientalist discourse that assumes essential difference between Europe and Eastern

Europe and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from and a lack of

Europeanness" (473). The conflict between Luise and Napoleon, that is Prussia and

France, additionally reminds one of the fact that the concept 'Europe' is everything but pan-European. The new member states in particular for instance criticize the European idea as being condensed, monopolised, and centralized by the French-German duo

(Deschaumes 521). 73 Tawada's circle writing around Luise, her "chain of mobile

workshops constituting, from hole to hole, a line of variation, a gallery" (Deleuze and

Guattari 458), therefore functions not only as a place from which to elaborate on contemporary issues facing Germany and Europe, but also as an opening for communication between various spatial, temporal, and conceptual terrains. As mentioned above, the statue of Luise for instance evokes Mori Ogai, whose memorial site is located

not far from the Tiergarten in the LuisenstraSe.74 Ogai's story illustrates that the history of Germany and Europe has been connected to that of Asia long before the age of globalization, and thus helps Tawada's continual efforts to dislocate Europe.75

Luise as a site at which to let the past and present communicate arises from her significance as a Prussian queen. Pulverschrift's thematization of Prussia comes at a time of growing nostalgia for Prussia, reinforced by the celebrations of Prussia's 300th

73 Deschaumes also recalls Victor Huges "Conclusion du Rhin" (1842), in which the poet writes: "La France et l'Allemagne sont essentiellement l'Europe. L'Allemagne es le cceur; la France est la tete." 74 Mori Ogai-Gedenkstatte, LuisenstraBe 39, 10117 Berlin, Germany. 75 In other works, such as the above-mentioned 'The Shadow Man", Tawada not only connects the history of Europe with the East but also to the histories of the North and South. 54 anniversary in 2001. In early 2002, a Brandenburg politician, for example, suggested to name a projected new federal state made out of Brandenburg and Berlin "Prussia," which unsurprisingly elicited mixed reactions.76 Similarly, the reconstruction of Berlin's

Stadtschloss (Berlin city palace), the former Prussian Royal Palace, decided upon by the

German parliament in 2007, points towards a certain 'PreuBen-Nostalgie' and its inherent problems. The Stadtschloss served as a residence for the Prussian kings (from 1701-1918) and the German Emperors (from 1871-1918), until it was destroyed after WWII. In its stead, the German Democratic Republic's government built the Palast der Republik

(Palace of the Republic), which opened in 1976. After an asbestos contamination shut down the Palast der Republic in 1990, the reunified German government decided to tear the Palast down in 2003, despite demonstrations in favour of maintaining this symbol of

East Germany's past. This past is now effectively being effaced by the rebuilding of the pre-socialist Berlin Stadtschloss, which steps over the uncomfortable period in German history between WWII and 1989, and East Germany's history in particular. However, as we have seen in this chapter, Tawada's allusions to Luise, Ogai, and Napoleon unearth

Prussian Berlin for its relevance for Berlin as a contemporary European city rather than indulging in nostalgia.

Tawada's Pulverschrift Berlin is a good example of glocal writing. As aforementioned, the term glocalization points out the ambiguity inherent in the processes of globalization. As Ulrich Beck shows, globalization incorporates processes of localization, where local cultures define themselves anew in a global context and thereby give rise to a non-traditional renaissance of the local (Beck "What is" 45-7). The Europe

76 Brandenburgischer Sozialminister Alwin Ziel, http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article375520/ Ein_Anfall_von_Nostalgie.html 55 that Tawada writes from and around the statue of Luise is a glocal holey space insofar as it is neither based on myths of territorial nations nor on the equally fiction tale of global non-places. Viewing the site of her writing as holey space, one cannot claim that the national context does not play any role in Tawada's work, nor that her Europe is a phantasm. There certainly are multiple ways of writing Berlin's or Europe's story, but they are not arbitrary. One cannot just pick that which suits one like the character of the journalist who remarks that she would hate Greek antiquity had its statues retained their colors CPulverschrift 102). Instead, Tawada is more like the Kreuzberg Punk, herself named Luise, who tries to re-color Luise's statue with graffiti (102). Similarly, the character of Ariadne in Opium fur Ovid, desiring a city to take a walk in, observes that such a city, while having to be invented, should not be invented out of nothing: "Ariadne konnte eine Stadt aus dem Nichts erfinden, in der es keine Stoffe gabe, aber da ist diese

Sehnsucht nach einem Stoff, den sie in die Hand nehmen und wieder loslassen kann"

(202).77 While sociologists Beck and Grande claim that Europe cannot be found

(gefunderi) but must be invented (erfunden), Tawada suggests that both finding and creating are necessary. Thus, her characters end the play with the sentence: "Vielen Dank flir Ihre Entdeckung" (108).78

77 'Ariadne could invent a city out of nothing, in which there would be no fabrics, but there is this longing for a fabric/drug/content, which she can take into her hands and release again.' 78 "Thank you for your discovery'. The theme of picking ones nose, which appears several times throughout the play, alludes to Ogai's quest for European examples of this practice in his short story "Dai hakken" (A great discovery or Die groBe Entdeckung) (1909), in which Ogai fictionalizes his own experience with a Japanese diplomat. Due to the lack of any full English or German translations of the story, I am grateful to Dennitza Gabrakova, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese, Translations, and Linguistics at the City University of Hong Kong, who drew my attention to Tawada's allusions to "Dai hakken." 56

CHAPTER III. §enocak's Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft: Archival Berlin

Die Metropolen Europas, alien voran Paris, Berlin und London sind wie Lahore, in denen die neuen Europaer, das sind sowohl die Einwanderer als auch die Einheimischen, Forscher und Versuchstiere zugleich sind. Werden sie zu Kosmopoliten oder zu Stammeskriegern, oder zu etwas ganz anderem, das wir heute noch nicht einmal ahnen konnen? (§enocak, "Mein Europa" 21 )79

Moving from Tawada's focus on the connections between Berlin and Japan, this chapter details Zafer $enocak's view of the interwoven histories of Berlin and Turkey. More specifically, I argue that §enocak's novel Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft employs the motif of the Armenian genocide in order to draw on archival Turkish-German histories. After introducing some of the issues surrounding the Armenian genocide, I proceed by arguing that §enocak reveals contemporary German commemorations of the Holocaust to lead to a monumentalization of the events of the past. It becomes apparent that this monumentalization and the accompanying canonization of select versions of history are used as the foundations upon which to build an exclusive communal identity. Instead of using the Armenian genocide to construct a similarly exclusive community based on guilt and victimhood, Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft draws on the Berlin dimensions of the atrocity to point to archival rather than canonized Turkish-Berlin histories. As I illustrate in the conclusion of this chapter, these archival histories allow for a potentially inclusive

Berlin community.

79 'The metropolises of Europe, especially Paris, Berlin and London, are like laboratories in which new Europeans, both immigrants as well as natives, are researchers and guinea pigs at once. Will they become cosmopolitans or tribal worriers, or something radically different, something entirely unforeseen?' 57

Canonized Berlin

In an article written before the publication of Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft (1998), Karin

Ye§ilada points out that Zafer §enocak's work repeatedly draws attention to the historical relationship between Berlin and Istanbul. This intertwined history dates back to at least the 17th-century presence of Turks in Berlin and includes events such as the German-

Turkish alliance in WWI, the WWII Turkish exile of Berlin Jews and their significant contributions to the young Turkish Republic, the impact of Turkish guest workers on rebuilding Berlin after WWII, and the latter's not insignificant role in making Berlin an artistic and multicultural centre after 1989 (Ye^ilada 312). As §enocak himself points out in an essay on Berlin, titled "Hauptstadt des Fragments," Berliners from a Turkish background have many historical points of connection with Berlin, such as Ernst Reuter, the first Berlin mayor after WWII who had been in exile in Turkey during the war, or the shooting of Talat Pascha in Berlin's Hardenbergstrasse in 1921.80 Except for the Turkish-

German military alliance, however, there is a marked lack of memory of this Turkish-

Berlin and German-Turkish history ("Hauptstadt" 161). Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft addresses this lack by unfolding some of the Berlin and German dimensions of the history of the Armenian genocide, which §enocak calls elsewhere "die tiirkisch armenische Tragik" that is "unsere Geschichte, unsere gemeinsame europaische

Geschichte auch" ("Genozid").81

§enocak's treatment of the Armenian genocide in Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft has occasioned harsh criticism.82 Strongly opposed to the novel's depiction of the Armenian

80 'The capital of the fragment' 81 'the Turkish Armenian tragedy'; 'our history, our common European history as well' 82 Jjienocak himself has also been criticized for his stance on the genocide (e.g. Stein). His Welt Online commentary on Turkey's censorship of Atom Egoyan's film Ararat (2004), for example, 58 genocide, Friederike Eigler for instance observes that the fragmentary way in which the novel alludes to the event comes close to a second tabooing of the genocide since the allusions are recognizable only by the already initiated (76-7).83 Similarly, Margaret

Littler argues that the novel "both narrates too little (in its allusive treatment of Armenian history) and too much (by integrating this traumatic history into a sentimental plot)"

("Guilt" 358) and Moray McGowan argues that the novel fails insofar as it does not offer a narrative of "the massacres nor of the complex background to their contested historiography" ("Turkish-German" 210).84 However, as Leslie Adelson points out, it was §enocak's aim neither to represent the Armenian genocide in a "metanarrative" nor to depict an "image of Armenian experience in any gripping detail" (Turkish Turn 119).

Also praising rather than criticizing the novel, Andreas Huyssen argues that the text rightly "represents the Armenian genocide as a gap, as an absence, though an explosive was interpreted as an attempt to question or even excuse the Armenian genocide. §enocak's article indeed does not directly answer the question of the title, that is, if it indeed was genocide ("Von Wolfen"). Moreover, the article gives the impression that §enocak is trying to relativize Armenian suffering, since he points out that many others were also suffering at the time. Yet, a careful reading of this and later articles shows that it is far from §enocak to minimize the reality of the Armenian genocide. As he points out, it would require immense moral coldness to try to balance Turkish with Armenian suffering ("Einbandagierte Seele"). §enocak certainly does not support the Turkish Republic in its continued denial that the deportations, rapes, massacres, and resulting extermination of over a million Armenians between 1915 and 1917 constitute genocide. In an interview, tellingly tided "Der Genozid an den Armeniern als historische Tatsache," §enocak states that it would be hard for anyone to question the events, stating that the facts are all on the table ("Genozid"). In defence of his critics, though, it is arguable how well known these facts really were - and continue to be—to his German readership at the turn of the century. While the mere mention of the Holocaust conjures up a host of names, dates, images and numbers around the world, the facts and details about the Armenian genocide are not sufficiently represented. 83 Amongst other things also regarding the fragmentary nature of the novel, Monika Shafi goes as far as to argue that "[ultimately, Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft thus suffers from a failure of narrative cohesion and literary imagination" and proposes that even if this may be the point the author wanted to make, it was not one made well (210). 84 Somewhat in contrast to these critics, Katharina Hall approves of §enocak's utilization of the similarities between the Armenian and Jewish genocide since this "provide[s] German readers with a way into the text, as the familiarity of the format in which these issues of guilt are presented facilitates a clear understanding of the novel's Turkish dimensions" (80). 59 one" that stands in stark contrast to post-Wende Germany's national self-definition bolstered by an exclusive memory culture ("Diaspora" 163, 160). Adelson further argues that this non-representational approach to the genocide is the result of the text's attempt to "revive remembrance, to restore the deep breathing of historical memory otherwise stifled or frozen in a culture of Betroffenheit" (Turkish Turn 116), and that this focus on a moment in German history prevents the text from "speak[ing] very effectively to an

Armenian need for visibility" (119). While I often draw on both Huyssen's and Adelson's insightful interpretations of the work, I locate the reasons for this lack of visibility elsewhere. Just as §enocak critiques contemporary German practices to commemorate the Holocaust for their monumentalizing efforts, which result in an exclusive community built on an equally exclusive past, §enocak's text refuses to canonize the memory of those responsible for the Armenian genocide. Rather than commemorating and building communities based on victimhood and guilt, Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft draws on the archive of a Turkish-German past evoked by the Armenian genocide, which points towards Turkish Berlin stories that are potentially more enabling for the multi-ethnic

Berlin Republic of the 1990s.85

Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft is part of a prose tetralogy consisting of Der Mann im Unterhemd (1995), Die Prarie (1997), Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft: Roman (1998), and Der Erottomane: Ein Findelbuch (1999). While varying greatly in genre and style, the four works are loosely connected by the figure of Sascha, who only really comes into

85 Adelson argues that the novel does not make "any claims about German military complicity in the Armenian genocide," stating in brackets that such topics "do not figure in the novel at all" (Turkish Turn 117). While I agree that the novel does not thematize German complicity in a way that shifts blame to the Kaiserreich, German involvement in the genocide actually figures rather prominently. 6 All German to English translations in this chapter are mine. However, there is a translation of Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft by Tom Cheesman, published by Hafan Books in 2009. 60 being as something akin to a protagonist in Die Prarie and Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft.87

In Die Prcirie Sascha introduces himself as a struggling, less than mediocre writer in his mid-30s, living in West Berlin in the late 1980s. After a series of highly sexualized relationships and some journalistic work, Sascha decides to leave Germany just before the fall of the wall and goes to "America" to spend a few years as a writer-in-residence and German language instructor at a small college on the prairies (69). Gefahrliche

Verwandtschaft picks up when Sascha, now with the last name Muhteschem and a wife called Marie, returns to Berlin in the summer of 1992, allegedly hoping that his wife will help him to make a home for himself there. His quest for a place called home becomes intertwined with an exploration of his family's past, prompted by the inheritance of his

Turkish grandfather's notebooks after the sudden death of his parents. However, the son of a Jewish-German mother and Turkish father, the blond and blue-eyed German Sascha speaks no Turkish, Russian, or Arabic. Only a combination of these would enable him to actually read the notebooks and to assess his grandfather's role in the Armenian genocide, which Sascha suspects may have figured in his grandfather's rather inexplicable suicide in 1936. Eventually, however, Sascha ceases to look for both an answer and a home with Marie. He leaves Marie and moves into an apartment in former

East Berlin, where he finally feels at home. There, he invents a sentimental love story, a copy of which concludes Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft, and which Sascha offers as an alternative reason for his grandfather's suicide.

87 Adelson rightly observes that even in Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft Sascha remains "flatly drawn rather than richly dimensional" (111), and others have criticized §enocak more generally for his "flat, lifeless figures" (McGowan 210). Sascha's figure is therefore far from being a fully developed character at any point of the tetralogy. 61

In Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft, as well as in his essayistic work, §enocak repeatedly critiques contemporary German memory practices. This critique and its implications for interpreting the novel's approach to the Holocaust and Armenian genocide can be more fully understood if one considers some of the characteristics of cultural memory. Aleida Assmann's theoretical work in this area offers a suitable conceptual framework within which to untangle some of the complexities involved. As

Assmann outlines, memory practices include processes not only of cultural memory but also of forgetting, both of which have an active and a passive form. The active form of forgetting can take the shape of violent destruction or censorship, such as that directed at

"an alien culture or a persecuted minority" ("Canon" 98). The passive form, in contrast, lacks intent. Objects are not materially destroyed but rather "fall out of the frames of attention, valuation, and use" (98) and can thus potentially be recovered by archaeology.

Just like forgetting, memory has an active and a passive form. Active remembering is done by means of what Assmann calls the "canon," the "actively circulated memory that keeps the past present," found in, for example, displays in a museum (98). Passive memory, in contrast, is preserved in the archive and not publicly displayed. Rather, it is accumulated in museums' storerooms or "in peripheral spaces such as cellars or attics"

(98). Drawing on Jakob Burckhardt, Assmann compares the canon to "messages" whose content is controlled by those in power (99). The canon aims at supporting "a collective identity" (109) and is propagated by institutions such as religion, art, and history. History in particular emerges as a powerful tool for nation states to produce narratives of the past to be "taught, embraced, and referred to as their collective autobiography" and publicly embodied in monuments and commemoration dates (101). The archive, on the other 62 hand, is peopled by traces, "unmediated testimonies of a former era that can tell a counter-history to the one propagated by the rulers" (99). Historical archives thus store potentially available but as yet not interpreted knowledge (103), suspending the stored material "in the intermediary state of 'no longer' and 'not yet'" (103). The contents of the archive are subject to selective mechanisms, and therefore, the archive can have gaps.

While the archaeologist uncovers the contents of passive forgetting it is the role of the literary writer to "fill in" these gaps or to at least mark them (106).

§enocak is very critical of the kind of active memory prevailing in post-Wende

Germany. As Huyssen points out, Berlin is paradigmatic for the cultural and political memory boom beginning in the 1980s, in which "memory has become a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe" (Huyssen, Present Pasts 11).

Considering the proliferation of monuments in post-Wende Germany, he also points out that the "more monuments there are, the more the past becomes invisible, the easier it is to forget: redemption, thus, through forgetting" ("Monumental Seduction" 193). Huyssen touches on the paradox that building a monument, rather than ensuring lasting memory, may "in fact turn out to mark the beginning of amnesia" (Rigney 345). §enocak's text inserts itself into this general discussion surrounding monumentalizing memory, speaking particularly to Berlin's attempts to commemorate the Holocaust by means of building what Martin Walser infamously called the monumentalization of shame. For Walser, this monumentalization was embodied in various proposed plans for the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. In his speech accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1998,

Walser called for a new approach to dealing with German guilt in a way that ensures that 63 the memory of Auschwitz is not merely a moral cudgel or compulsory exercise in lip service:

An der Diskussion um das Holocaustdenkmal in Berlin kann die Nachwelt

einmal nachlesen, was Leute anrichteten, die sich fur das Gewissen von

anderen verantwortlich fiihlten. Die Betonierung des Zentrums der

Hauptstadt mit einem fuBballfeldgroBen Alptraum. Die

Monumentalisierung der Schande. (Walser)88

Published in the same year, §enocak's text shares the thrust of Walser's argument, that is, that current German practices to commemorate the Holocaust prevent rather than further an adequate memory of the events. As Adelson rightly observes, Senocak depicts a

"German landscape of public memory in which ritualized speech and monumental commemorations of Jewish suffering and German guilt promote a sense of historical accountability, on the one hand, and an affect of Betroffenheit obscuring the reasons for being moved, on the other" (Turkish Turn 116). Katharina Hall criticises Sascha's character because she finds that he fails to appreciate "the urgent Jewish need to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive on German soil" (77). Yet, she misses the point the text is making, which is that the way in which this memory is commemorated in Germany actually deadens it. As Sascha observes, it is the loss of memory itself that Germans are mourning, since it has been replaced by Betroffenheit, which is "die passende

Befindlichkeit fur Gedenktage, ein sentimentaler Begriff, der die korperliche Trauer

88 'The discussions surrounding the Holocaust memorial in Berlin will allow posterity to glean what havoc people wreak who feel responsible for the conscience of others. The cementing of the capital's center with a nightmare the size of a soccer field. The monumentalization of shame/disgrace.' Walser here refers to the model initially chosen for the memorial in a 1995 competition, which consisted of a slanted slab of concrete the size of two soccer fields. The design was received very unfavorably by the public and the German government eventually vetoed its implementation. 64 aufhebt" (GV 62).89 Remembering and mourning are no longer located in the individual but are merely re-enacted by a group, giving birth to the "Farce aus dem Geist der

Tragodie" (62).90 It is forgetting rather than remembering that takes place after

"Architekten des Vergessens bauen ihre pomposen Bauwerke in die zugigen

Gedachtnislucken" (74).91

In Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft memorials are also criticized since they figure as markers for some claimed essential historical truth. The text epistemologically rejects histories based on such truth claims, which are shown to be informed by the model of archaeology. As mentioned above, archaeology is the science appropriate for discovering objects of passive forgetting. Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft repeatedly points to an overlap between archaeological metaphors and the language of secrecy. Like archaeological objects, secrets are hidden, waiting to be discovered. Both stake a claim to some kind of authenticity or truth merely waiting to be dug out or uncovered. When confronted with a multilingual translator able to decipher Sascha's grandfather's notebooks, Sascha feels ambivalent about the possibility of facing a final "Entschliisselung" and the illumination of the "dunklen Stellen in [s]einer Herkunft"(l 16).92 Deciding nevertheless to leave the diaries with the translator, Sascha tries to convince himself that this could be his personal

Wende, and temporarily gives in to the longing to find "tiefere Schichten [s]einer selbst"

89 'The appropriate sensibility for commemoration days, a sentimental concept which annuls bodily mourning.'; Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft is from now on referred to as GV in parenthesis. 90 'farce from the spirit of tragedy'; This play on Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragodie aus dem Geiste der Musik functions to undercut the preceding scope of the narrator's sweeping observations regarding the German spirit. The narrative voice repeatedly undercuts its authority throughout the text in like manner. For instance, the widely discussed passage about a German- Jewish-Turkish trialogue is followed by a comment on the groundlessness of such optimism (89- 90). 91 'architects of forgetting build their pompous edifices in the drafty gaps in memory' 92 'deciphering'; 'the dark spots in his ancestry' 65 by means of "die Entdeckung [s]einer Herkunft" and the lifting of his grandfather's secret

(118).93

This imagery of holes and darkness is concentrated in a short chapter relating a seemingly random story about Tante Holle (Aunt Hell) and Gute Eva (Good Eve). Tante

Holle lives in a small isolated hut with a dark, deep, maze-like chute beneath her bed, which provides her nourishment that makes her immortal. This chute is equated with

Tante Holle's exceptionally good memory, when the narrator explains: "Ein Gedachtnis ist erst einmal ein sehr groBes Loch, eines aus dem die schrecklichsten Alptraume hochsteigen.... Tante Holle war in diesem Loch zu Hause" (88).94 When Good Eva comes to the hut to offer food and her services, Tante Holle throws her into her chute to heat the room, encountering no resistance from Good Eva, who is said to have had a lifetime to practise obeying (88).95 Alluding to the Grimm fairy tale Frau Holle, in which the protagonist is rewarded for following all orders she is given, §enocak's tale in part alludes to the German discussion pertaining to the role of the Wehrmacht and general

German population in executing the Holocaust.96 After the German publication of Daniel

Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners in 1996, this discussion took center stage on account of Goldhagen's claim that Germans participated freely and out of ideological conviction rather than because they were merely following orders (Niven

126). More importantly, §enocak's tale also focuses on the connection between

93 'deeper layers of his self by means of 'the discovery of his ancestry' 94 'A memory is first and foremost a very large hole, one from which the most terrible nightmares emerge.... Aunt Hell was at home in this hole.' 95 Eva is thus literally used as firewood, which corresponds to the German idiomatic expression for exploiting someone, i.e. "jemanden verheitzen." The implicit reference to the Holocaust is close to the borderline of bad taste—a line §enocak's text repeatedly finds itself straddling. 96 Frau Holle is sometimes also referred to as Tante Holle. In the tale, a good, industrious daughter and her lazy stepsister consecutively arrive in the land of Frau Holle after falling into a deep well. The good girl, who does everything she is asked or told to do, is rewarded in the end. 66 immortality and death. While not an allegory—the contradictory and fragmentary nature of the novel as whole prevents any allegorical reading— the tale seems to suggest that immortalized memory is merely the stuff of nightmarish fairy tales. That is, all narratives of the past are merely narratives, and the notion that there is some truth to be arrived at while digging in one's personal or national history is not only misguided but also, as will be shown below, potentially dangerous.

Instead of digging below, the novel repeatedly emphasizes looking for answers above ground, indicated by a prevalence of the roof as an important site. Sascha, forbidden to play in the potentially mined garden, plays in the storage room ("Speicher") under the roof ("Dachboden") as a child, ironically finding rather explosive photographs of a man with a strange moustache, presumably either his grandfather or Hitler ($enocak,

GV 9). Even though his parents immediately burn the photos, Sascha develops an obsession with collecting photographs of Third Reich era buildings and men in uniform

(9). When his father announces that he will reveal some family secrets to Sascha in

Istanbul - which are in typical fashion of the novel never revealed - Sascha's surprise in part stems from the fact that they are sitting under the roof of a hotel (26), which seems to him an unlikely place for bequeathing secrets. Moreover, Alex, a friend supposed to help him translate his grandfather's diaries, also lives under the roof in an apartment eventually occupied by Sascha (114). Finally, it is after leaving Marie and living under the roof that Sascha feels able to write his grandfather's story (134). Throughout the novel, important events are not associated with depth, holes, or underground imagery but rather with the opposite. However, the identity of the man in the photograph is never explained, Sascha's father does not actually tell his secret, Alex never translates the 67 notebooks, and Sascha apparently never uncovers the historical facts regarding his grandfather's life and death. Therefore, any hopes to obtain answers from above are as misguided as any efforts to find them beneath. Just as there is no truth to be dug out from below, there is none to be revealed from some transcendent above.

Memory Elites

Even though Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft criticizes contemporary German memory practices for being based on monumentalizing and archaeological impulses, the text does not put forth some postmodern view of all history as relative. That is, §enocak's text of course does not deny the realities and horrors of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Rather, Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft questions building collective identities around the dark void of trauma and in such a fashion as to exclude all others from membership and participation in the community. Rather than uncovering an objective truth submerged under layers of time or beneath a grandfather's coded languages, the quest for identity in one's origins is a journey necessarily circling around the seeker. As

Dayioglu-Yucel observes, "[es] wird mit Sascha ein Paradebeispiel einer postmodernen

Figur konstruiert und zugleich dekonstruiert, wenn diese auf die Suche nach ihrer

Vergangenheit geschickt wird, 'um tiefere Schichten [s]einer selbst zu linden"'

("Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft" 108).97 Ultimately, such digging merely leads back to the subjective truths of one's own dark chute, the aborescent paths of which would take more than a lifetime to explore (Senocak, GV 87). As §enocak points out elsewhere, in

"Germany, history is read as a diary of the community of destiny

97 'with Sascha, an exemplary postmodern figure is simultaneously constructed and deconstructed, when the figure is send to search for his past in order to find deeper layers of his self 68

(Schicksalgemeinschaft), the nation's personal experience, to which others have no

QQ access" (Atlas of a Tropical Germany 53). Focused on its own past, Germany revolves around itself and, like Tante Holle, sacrifices any Other to feed its own chute. As

§enocak's character provocatively points out, in a culture of Betroffenheit both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans have made memory their "Lingua franca"; Jewish efforts revolve around keeping the German consciousness of its nation's guilt alive (§enocak,

GV 60) while Germans commune around the notion of their collective national guilt.

Thus, Germany continues to be "wie ein Gerichtssaal, in dem ununterbrochen angeklagt und gerichtet wurde" (34), various factions and groups taking turn on the dock, including

Turkish generals, Nazis, members of the Stasi, Serbs and the 68-generation (34)."

Both the community of victims and that of the perpetrators thus form an exclusive

"Elite der Erinnerung, die Eingeweihten, die Schicksalsgemeinschaft" (121),100 and this community is of course inaccessible to those who did not participate in the extraordinary events around which the group in question has formed its identity (120). Having missed both the Holocaust as well as the fall of the Wall, Sascha therefore becomes a stranger or foreigner in a post-Wende Berlin obsessed with its past. As Petra Fachinger points out, by refusing participation, Sascha does not confront his Jewish heritage, a move that would have been able to purchase him membership in the Jewish community of fate

98 Here, §enocak also criticizes the self-centered thrust of both Vaterliteratur and Enkeliteratur. As several critics point out, §enocak's novel plays with the conventions of so-called fathers' and grandfathers' or grandchildren's literature. Written by the second or third postwar generation of Germans and addressing questions of inherited guilt and responsibility, their common theme is "their focus on a fictitious or autobiographical first person who asserts his or her identity relative to his/her family and to German history"(Assmann, "Limits" 33). For an in-depth exploration of the intersections between §enocak's text and Vaterliteratur and Grossvaterliteratur, see Eigler. 99 'Germany was like a courtroom in which there was a never ceasing stream of accusations and judgments.' 100 'The elites of memory, the initiated, the community of fate.' 69

("Hybridity" 165). When a resident in his building reacts to increased violence against foreigners by inviting any Jewish neighbours to come meet him in the spirit of - a parodied - intercultural dialogue, Sascha only briefly considers introducing himself.101

He also does not respond to another note soon following this invitation, which advertises for a neurologist whose office is not coincidentally located in the "Monumentenstrasse"

(§enocak, GV 122). Instead, Sascha refuses to become diagnosed with any kind of trauma to be canonized and monumentalized for the sake of forming or being assigned a collective identity.

However, the text not only critiques a communal identity based on shared victimization, but also emphasizes the one based on shared guilt—a collective identity

Sascha is much more drawn to. Rather than claiming his Jewish or immigrant affiliation,

Sascha ironically attempts to become German by means of identifying with German guilt and what §enocak elsewhere describes as Germany's "an Selbsthass grenzende und nimmermude werdende Norgeleien, ein Hadern mit sich selbst, mit deutscher Identitat und deutschen Traumata" ("Dunkle deutsche Seele").102 Since Sascha lacks ancestors who share in German guilt, he claims the heritage of his Turkish grandfather, said to have drawn up the first deportation list with 500 Armenian names (§enocak, GV 40). His grandfather's potential guilt, accrued during the Armenian genocide, allows Sascha to

"speak the 'lingua franca' of contemporary Germany, the language of contrition, alongside his German fellows-in-guilt" (McGowan, "Turkish-German" 210).103 Realizing that a clearly defined identity has become the new requirement for belonging after

101 Sencoak here alludes to the arson attacks on asylum seekers and immigrants in 1992 and 1993 in Molln, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, and Solingen. 102 'a tireless nagging that borders on self-hatred, a quarrel with oneself, with German identity and German traumas' 103 For a similar argument, see Littler ("Guilt" 357). 70 reunification, Sascha starts to dig up his past to find his own share of guilt. Doing so, he reinserts himself in post-Wende Berlin: "Plotzlich war ich kein Fremder mehr in Berlin.

Ich war hier nicht nur zu Hause. Ich gehorte auch dazu" (§enocak, GV 47).104 As

Dayioglu-Yucel rightly points out, this purchasing of membership in the German community via an obsession with one's guilty family past is a highly ironic aspect of the novel, a fact missed by most critics (Dayioglu-Yiicel, "Kulturelle").105 §enocak's character's desire to belong to the German community by means of a guilty grandfather is no less absurd than the motivation underlying the genre of GroJSvaterliteratur, whose authors paradoxically aimed to define themselves by or in opposition to someone else's sins of the past.

Berlin's Armenian Archives

Even though Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft undermines the idea that being part of, or immigrating into, Germany entails becoming part of a Schicksalsgemeinschaft bound together and memorialized by some mythical shared past, it does not ignore the need to tell stories that anchor the individual in place and time. Unlike his wife Marie, a documentary filmmaker focused on what she deems to be objective facts, Sascha eventually follows through with his earlier decision, "das Leben [s]eines GroBvaters nicht zu rekonstruieren, sondern zu erfinden" (§enocak, GV 38).106 However, this invention is not completely dissociated from any kind of information or facts. As Sascha points out,

104 'Suddenly, I was no longer a stranger. I was not only at home here, I also belonged.' 105 In her book, Dayioglu-Yiicel also insightfully argues: "Gerade die Widerspriiche, die paradoxen Aussagen Saschas, machen die Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft zu dem, was sie ist: einer ironischen Abrechnung mit dem deutschen 'Schuldbewusstsein'" ("Gefdhrliche Verwandtschaft" 108). 106 'not to reconstruct but rather to invent his grandfather's life' 71 he has information about his grandfather that cannot be simply forgotten, and he wonders if the diaries are not part of his memory despite the fact that he cannot decipher them

(38). The diaries remain part of his archival memory, stored but not accessed, known but unknown insofar as they are not translated or interpreted. The text thus confronts the paradox involved in accessing archival knowledge for counter-historical purposes. Once accessed and interpreted, formerly archival material enters the realm of the actively remembered and can be co-opted by the canon makers. Put differently, Gefdhrliche

Verwandtschaft attempts to find a way in which to access not yet canonized history without thereby automatically canonizing the material.

Thus, Senocak's text makes the necessarily imperfect effort to let archival material be archival material, which implies leaving it in the not yet. For instance, the grandfather's notebook is never translated, at least not for the reader, and if Sascha gains information from it, it does not seem to enter his final fictional account of his grandfather's suicide. There are also several other notebooks that remain unopened in the text. As a child, Sascha writes the questions occurring to him while reading into notebooks. He never clarifies most of these questions and therefore becomes "gegeniiber jeder Art von Verstehen skeptisch" (§enocak, GV 59).107 He also continually collects sentences that he deems worthy to be part of his imagined future book, which he however never actually writes (21). And in two other sets of notebooks, Sascha collects inventions and memories, whereby his collection of memories is actually an accumulation of quotes from books he has read. He sometimes confuses the two notebooks, so that the lines between citing, remembering, and inventing are thoroughly blurred. For Sascha, who does not claim to be a scientist, this blurring does not pose any problem since there is not

107 'skeptical of any kind of understanding' 72

"eine objektive Stimme ... die Wissen sammelt und verbreitet" (85).108 Thus, Sascha regularly goes to the city's archives rather than the libraries. He taps into the not yet used-up ("unverbrauchten") side of history to flesh out, and if necessary alter, the constructed figure of his grandfather, leaving the used-up side of history to historians for reconstruction and dissemination (51-2). Sascha also goes to Berlin's many "private

Archive mit unbekanntem Material" (65), 1QO collecting handwritten material by Nazis from widows happy to find a grateful recipient and receptive listener in the blond and blue-eyed Sascha. While the text mentions graphology as an interpretive method, there are no interpretive attempts by Sascha, and the collection eventually comes to be stored alongside his insect collection in his mother's house, the one place in his life where

"[s]eine Vergangenheit aufbewahrt und fur [ihn] erreichbar bleibt" (66).110 That is, it is once more archived.

Adelson points out that even if his Munich home - and I would add his and his grandfather's notebooks as well - constitutes an archive, it is "not one accessed in any way" (Turkish Turn 109). However, that is exactly the point. Considering that all the

Cyrillic passages from the grandfather's notebooks turn out to be citations themselves

(§enocak, GV 115) and given the text's lack of faith in the objectivity of collected material - a lack Assmann also points to when stressing the selective nature of archival material - it becomes apparent why the notebooks' content has to remain undisclosed to the reader. It is not even apparent whether or not Sascha follows through with his agreement to have the notebooks translated in weekly installments and therefore it is likely that the contents are not even disclosed to Sascha. Unlike Assmann, who celebrates

108 'an objective voice [...] which collects and disseminates knowledge' 109 'private archives with unknown material' 110 'his past is stored and remains accessible to him' 73 the liberating or subversive potential of the archive, §enocak's text is aware of the fact that any counter-history can quickly become an orthodoxy. As Sascha points out, his father never liked to tell stories because in "Geschichten werden alle Ratsel aufgelost"

(36).111 While he does not inherit his father's secrets, Sascha does inherit his father's refusal to claim that there is some truth or secret that actually can be revealed. Fittingly,

Sascha likes Marie's first documentary film, which was too dark, because the darkness 119 creates an atmosphere "die nicht alles preisgab, was gezeigt wurde" (22). Things are intentionally left in the dark, not given visibility, to save them from the fate the memory of the Holocaust currently faces in Germany.

Here, it is important to point out that Sascha's father's dislike and mistrust of narration is directed against stories or "Geschichten," but not against the act of telling something itself. For instance, for Sascha, his father's eyes told everything he needed to know. Playing with a somewhat cliched notion that "Geschichte" denotes both story and history, the text points out that not all stories are histories. Encouraging himself to tell his grandfather's story, the narrator observes that one does not have to believe every story one hears, and that there would be no stories at all if they were all true (§enocak,

GV 77). As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft refuses to narrativize a coherent and detailed story about the Armenian genocide. The text thereby refuses to build a monument to Sascha's war-criminal grandfather and, by extension, to Turkish guilt and any potential German complicity in the Armenian genocide. As a character and individual, Sascha is as a result refused any roots in a

111 'in stories, riddles are (dis)solved' 112 'did not reveal everything that was shown' 113 "Vater hatte nie gern erzahlt, jedenfalls keine Geschichten." (36); 'Father never liked to tell things, at least not (his)stories.' 74 bloodied soil. Looking for the place at which he can rip open the soil underneath his grandfather's feet in order to dig him out from underneath his guilt, Sascha simultaneously realizes that there is no such spot, that it is not marked in any atlas (40).114

Moreover, his grandfather is not allowed to stand in the dock alongside other Turkish generals as part of the permanent exhibition of guilt in the courtroom that is Germany

(34), and does not achieve the kind of immortality purchased by blood that for instance

Talat Pascha has acquired.

Talat Pascha, the central figure of Marie's documentary film, is introduced by the

Berlin location where he was shot by a young Armenian in the HardenbergstraBe in 1921.

In further conversation, Marie identifies him as a mass-murderer of a stature comparable to Hitler (§enocak, GV 15). Half-way into the novel, the reader learns that Talat Pascha started out as a teacher at a Jewish school in Thessaloniki and became a leader of the

Committee of Union and Progress, the Ittihat ve Terakki party, which was opposed to the sultanate and promoted a free civic Ottoman empire. Marie is interested in finding out how such a successful, enlightened politician was able to become a mass murderer, responsible for the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during WWI (72).

The text presents these names and events as if they were as well known as Goebbels, the

SS, or Auschwitz. However, these rather sparse details about Talat Pascha raise more questions about him than they answer. For instance, what is the CUP? Who killed Talat

Pascha and why? How did the German government deal with Pascha's assassination?

114 "Schuld versinkt in der Erde, auf der die Tat veriibt worden ist. Sie lagert dort unter den FiiBen des Taters. Ich werde die Erde unter den FiiBen meines GroBvaters aufreiBen, ihn freischaufeln von seiner Schuld. Ich muss diesen Flecken Erde finden, der in keinem Atlas verzeichnet ist" (40).; 'Guilt sinks into the soil on which the crime was perpetrated. It is stored there under the feet of the perpetrator. I am going to rip open the soil underneath my grandfather's feet; I will dig him free of his guilt. I have to find this patch of earth, which is not marked on any atlas.' 75

And why was he in Berlin in the first place? Further questions are less immediate but no less important, such as why his name is not widely known outside of Turkey. Talat

Pascha, the historical figure, thus becomes as surrounded by secrets as Sascha's grandfather, and neither figure will ever be truly reconstructed. Thus, Sascha points out that Marie's vision of Talat Pascha may be skewed because, even though she is meticulous about consulting Western language sources on Talat Pascha, she does not consult Turkish sources that are likely to provide her with an entirely different picture of his life (16), revealing that her research is closer to Sascha's constructive approach to his grandfather than she would ever admit. Rather than presenting historical information on

Talat Pascha, §enocak thus offers the reader questions to be pursued—questions, the even partial answers to which show that the history of the Armenian genocide is in fact also

Germany's and Europe's history.

Histories of Turkish Berlin

Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft points in some of the directions in which a search for these answers can lead. Asked by a newspaper to interview young Turkish immigrants living in

Germany, Sascha reports a monologue by Ali, a real-estate agent, whose speech is called

"Rede an die Deutschen."115 Ali addresses Germans as a sick people to be saved by

Turkish youths, the "neuen Patrioten Deutschlands," who will take Germany into their firm hand (§enocak, GV 96).116 §enocak here not only parodies the kinds of monologues

115 'Address to the Germans' 116 'the new patriots of Germany' 76 published by Zaimoglu.117 More importantly, he alludes to Emperor Wilhelm II's speech

"An das deutsche Volk," given in 1914 at the start of WWI.118 In his address, Wilhelm, who was very sympathetic to the Sultanate, pledges his loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, the ally "der um sein Ansehen als GroBmacht kampft und mit dessen Erniedrigung auch unsere Macht und Ehre verloren ist."119 Similarly, Ali pledges that the young migrants will come to rescue the fat and fearful Germans, that they will be Germany's defence

"wenn dieses Land angepiBt wird" (§enocak, GV 96).120 Just as Germany and the other

European countries had turned their attention to the Sick Man at the Bosporus before and during WWI, mostly in an attempt to secure their portion of the grumbling empire and to thwart Russian influence, Ali promises to heal the sick Germans, repeatedly addressed as

"Ihr Kranken!" (97).121 The figure of Ali, next to all the parody, conjures up the often neglected historical military relationship between Germany and TurkeEoy as well as pointing to a necessary re-examination of what §enocak calls the "unheilvolle Rolle" of the European colonial powers in Ottoman politics before and during WWI ("Von

Wolfen").122 The most interesting aspect of invoking Emperor William II, however, is that his admiration for the Ottoman Empire was based not only on self-interest. As

Vahakn Dadrian points out, the Emperor's affinity with the Sultan and his admiration of

117 Ali is the only figure in Zaimoglu's Kanak Sprak whose real identity is certainly identifiable as Ali Aksoy or DJ Ali, of the hip hop group 'da crime posse,' who inspired Zaimoglu to write Kanak Sprak (Cheesman, Novels 148). 118 'To the German people'; The phrase also indexes Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Reden and die deutsche Nation (1808). 119 'who is fighting for his reputation as a great power and whose humiliation would also be our loss of power and honor'; Kaiser Wilhelm II's speech "An das deutsche Volk" was given in Berlin on the 6th August 1914 and can be found in the online archive of the Deutsches Historisches Museum at http://www.dhm.de/lemo/suche/dokumente.html. 120 'when this country is dissed' 121 'You sick people!' 122 'malevolent role' 77 the power of theocracy invested in the latter, was strong enough for him to "appreciate

Islam as a unifying force" comparable to the "magnetic spell of the ascetic virtues of an idealized Prussia," so that he came to regard "Turkey as the Prussia of the Orient"

("History" 253). By alluding to the Emperor, §enocak's text thus points out that less than a hundred years ago, a European power, albeit mostly out of political self-interest, evidently did not view Islam as being as incompatible with European values as is suggested by the positions taken by several European governments, not least Germany's, on the question of Turkey's proposed accession to the European Union.

The Ottoman leadership returned the Emperor's admiration a few years later through Enver Pascha, the leader of the Ittihadists. After they overthrew the Sultanate in

1913, the Ittihadists sought out German military assistance to reorganize the Ottoman army, a move strongly supported by Enver Pascha, whose "sympathies for the Germans bordered on exaltation of Germany" (Dadrian, "History" 204). §enocak writes merely two sentences on the subject, i.e. "1915 ist das Jahr der Leichen. Das Osmanische Reich

1T1 ist an der Seite des deutschen Kaiserreichs in den Kneg getreten" (Senocak, GV 39).

He thereby refuses to establish any explicit causal relationship between, on the one hand, the Turkish-German military alliance formed August 1914, and, on the other hand, the corpses of the Armenian genocide that commenced on April 24th, 1915. Yet, by their sheer proximity in the text and despite the fact that the exact nature of Germany's role in the genocide is a matter of historical controversy, in which he does not engage, §enocak points out that the genocide and the questions related to it nevertheless constitute a shared

123 '1915 is the year of the corpses. The Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the German Empire.' 78

Turkish-German history.124 Adelson's above-cited claim that the question of German complicity does not figure in the text at all therefore is overstated. What does not figure is the actual question of guilt, not least because §enocak's text rejects guilt as a foundation for both individual and collective identity. That is, while §enocak definitively draws attention to the German involvement in Turkey during WWI, he does not do so in order to simply add to the ever growing list of German Schuld and Schande or to establish some kind of Turkish-German brotherhood in guilt.125

Without aiming to belittle the horror of the Armenian genocide, the novel's emphasis on the figure of Talat Pascha is in fact the key to a more positive story of

German-Turkish history. Talat ordered the arrest and execution of hundreds of Armenian leaders on April 24th, 1915, the date now considered as being the beginning of the genocide. At the end of the war in 1918, Talat, with German help, fled to Berlin and thus to safety. Talat and others were found guilty of massacring the Armenians and sentenced to death in absentia by an Ottoman tribunal, set up on July 5th, 1919 due to pressure exerted by the victorious Allies (Bobelian 55). Since Germany refused to extradite members of the Turkish leadership, Talat continued to live unharmed in Berlin.

124 As Dadrian argues, the Ottoman Empire explicitly used the alliance with Germany and the war as a cover to solve the 'Armenian Question,' a fact of which the German military and government was quite aware and which it accepted for the sake of undisturbed diplomatic relations. Thus, it was on account of "explicit and strict orders from the German High Command in Berlin" that the significant number of German officers acting in often high positions in the Turkish military were forbidden to intervene in the Ottoman treatment of the Armenians ("History" 205). Correspondingly, the German press was "explicitly told to not investigate nor publish on the issue" ("History" 206). The notion of German complicity in the Armenian genocide is therefore not entirely unfounded and §enocak duly points to that possibility. 125§enocak does allude to the more widely remembered Turkish-German brotherhood in arms. For instance, Sascha's Jewish grandfather was in Istanbul with the German army in 1916, in the Turkish-German forces commanded by Liman von Sanders, even though he was not deployed at the Dardanelles (54), where von Sanders defended the Ottoman empire after Enver Pascha turned over command to him. Sascha's grandfather is proudly related that he fought in the same troop as Mustapha Kemal Pascha, whom he refused to call Ataturk" (54). 79

Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian survivor, shot and killed Talat Pascha on March 15,

1921, in front of a villa in the HardenbergstraBe, Berlin (60-1). Marie is disappointed after visiting the HardenbergstraBe with her camera team, finding that there is nothing there to record. However, it is her focus on Talat, rather than Tehlirian, that prevents any living images from arising. It is the Berlin trail of Tehlirian which made the Armenian genocide visible to a shocked German public for the first time. In Berlin, civilians and military personal such Dr. Johannes Lepsisus and Otto Liman von Sanders acted as witnesses and provided evidence that soon made the trial into an "indictment of the

Ottoman Empire's - and Talat's crimes" rather than Tehlirian's, who was acquitted on the grounds of temporary insanity (64). The very trial that the victors and the Ottoman leadership had failed to see through on account of other political considerations, therefore

"[i]n a way ... took place inside the Berlin courtroom" (63). Ironically, Marie does not make a documentary on Tehlirian, whom she merely refers to as "this young Armenian," or about the court proceedings (§enocak, GV 15). She is much more interested in and fascinated by Talat's psychology and by his wife (15), willing to document and make a monument to him in her film. The text as a whole, on the other hand, by opening up questions about 'this young Armenian' and Talat's unexplained presence in Berlin, invites one to discover a mostly forgotten Berlin courtroom in 1921, in which German judges and citizens made visible and condemned the first massacre internationally called a crime against humanity. In contrast to the chute-like hole Germany has dug around the

Holocaust, §enocak here presents "ein dunkles Loch, dessen Weite oder Enge ich nicht

126 Tehlirian was most likely part of Operation Nemesis, an operation "designed to track down and kill the Genocide's chief perpetrators" (Boeblian 59). 80 einschatzen kann, in dem ich andere atmen hore, aber nicht sehen kann" (90).127 Asking questions, §enocak thus allows for an active, individual remembrance of the Armenian genocide, one that breathes rather than being stifled by Betrojfenheit.n%

The attempt to point to a more positive Turkish-German history, beyond any simplistic analogies based on both countries' being guilty of their respective genocides, becomes most apparent in the novel's emphasis on the exile of German intellectuals in

Turkey. Rather than Sascha's Turkish grandfather's story, it is the one of his Jewish grandfather, a German exile in Turkey who learned Turkish and lived there happily, that ultimately offers some kind of orientation for the multi-ethnic Sascha. For the newly established Turkish Republic trying to modernize itself, the Jewish or otherwise dissident

German exiles came as if called for (§enocak, GV 55). Jewish economists, architects, jurists, and philologists who had to flee from Nazi Germany were warmly received by

Ankara, and their intellectual attitudes and labour markedly influenced the newly founded

Turkish universities. While this depiction of Turkey is balanced by a description of the

Tokathyan as the favourite hotel of Turkish Nazism (55) and by a brief historical explanation of the roots of Greek and Armenian Christian anti-Semitism (55-6), the text nevertheless points to an aspect of Turkish-German history and co-operation that could serve as a positive example today.129 The text points to a similarly encouraging history to

127 'a dark hole, the width or narrowness of which I cannot guess, but in which I hear others breathe without being able to see them' 1281 am here inverting Adelson's claim that the text gives breathing room to Holocaust remembrance at the expense of the Armenian genocide (Turkish Turn 116). 129 §enocak can also not be accused of nostalgically portraying the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. Sascha merely points out that while they may not always have lived amongst each other peacefully, they at least survived living together: "Tiirken und Griechen, Armenier, Juden und Kurden, Tscherkessen, Albaner, Bosniaken, Bulgaren, Assyrer und Georgier. Sie hatten achthundert Jahre lang zusammengelebt, nicht immer friedlich, aber sie hatten das Zusammenleben iiberlebt"(75). 'Turks and Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Kurds, Circassians, 81 be found in Berlin itself. Somewhat ironically calling Marie a Berliner born to parents who are also "waschechte Berliner" of Huguenot and Silesian descent, §enocak taps into the city's multicultural archive (20).130 The Huguenots, refugees from France, were in a way Berlin's first guest workers in the second half of 17lh-century, when Kurfurst

Friedrich Wilhelm's Brandenburg actively recruited them (Hartweg 423). Like the

German exiles in Turkey some centuries later, the Huguenots significantly contributed to the modernization of Brandenburg (424). While enjoying significant minority rights, they assimilated over the course of time, not without in turn influencing their host culture, and many eventually became what §enocak's Ali would call the new patriots (§enocak, GV

96), or in Bismarck's words, the "besten Deutschen" (Hartweg 448). $enocak thus points to a colourful mosaic embedded in Turkish-German history, which shows that Europeans do not necessarily have to become tribal warriors and could counteract the renaissance of the national "in der multiethnisch gemischten europaischen Wirklichkeit des 21.

Jahrhunderts" ("Auf die Turkei").131

The novel hereby does not advocate some form of facile cosmopolitan multicultural Europe. As Sascha points out, it is rather doubtful that one can overcome the world in airplanes since "[w]ie noch nie zuvor ist die Menschheit in die Welt verstrickt" (§enocak, GV 50).132 §enocak's emphasis on remembering a more positive common Turkish-German history also does not advocate any transnational model of belonging. As Huyssen argues, the "political site of memory practices is still national, not post-national or global" {Present Pasts 16). Adelson also rightly points out that "the here

Albanians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Assyrians and Georgians. They lived together for eight hundred years, not always peacefully, but they survived living together.' 130 'born-and-bred Berliners' 131 'in the multiethnically mixed European reality of the 21st century' 132 'humanity is ensnarled in the world like never before' 82 and now of Perilous Kinship delineate[s] or engage[s] a predominantly German context rather than one we might simply call transnational" (Turkish Turn 115). That is, the historical fragments the text raises from oblivion to offer for research and interpretation are only meaningful within the context of the Berlin Republic. Sascha therefore does not travel after his figures like Marie does. In Turkey "sind keine Dinge mehr fur [ihn] aufbewahrt, deren Wert fur die Gegenwart auf den ersten Blick ersichtlich sind"

(§enocak, GV 74).133 Of no immediate use for the present, historical information has little value for Sascha. What are useful are those stories that allow post-Wende Berlin to deal with the new realities emerging from the fact that it is now a city open to the East:

"Berlin ist eine nach Osten hin offene Stadt. Doch statt sich mit Fragen der Meteorologie, also den neuen, immer kraftiger werdenden Winden zu beschaftigen, beschaftigt man sich in der Stadt mit sich selbst" (128).134 It is Ali who is "ein frischer Wind," and even if his speech has to be taken with a large grain of salt like everything else in this text, Ali is a "Immobilienmakler," selling homes he knows to exist for everyone in Germany.

Looking at the Turkish-German past without focusing on guilt and shame, one can actually learn something from history, not least about how Germany can become a home to its Others.

In contrast to the dark holes that are created by an exclusive memory culture focused on self-definition rather than on keeping the memory of the Other alive, §enocak joins Ali as well as the narrator, who observes: "Ich war auch einer von vielen

Maulwiirfen in der Stadt. Wir sorgten dafiir, das der Boden, auf dem die neue Hauptstadt

133 'there are no things, whose value for the present is apparent at first sight, stored there for him' 134 'Berlin is a city open towards the East. However, instead of occupying itself with meteorological questions, that is, with the new, continuously strengthening winds, the city occupies itself with itself.' 83 errichtet werden sollte, immer locker und tiickisch unfest blieb" (§enocak, GV 47-48).135

Instead of completely taking the ground away from underneath the Berlin Republic,

§enocak's work merely destabilizes some of its foundations, such as an exclusive community in memory. From the cracks and fissures of such a destabilization, paths emerge that suggest ways in which the fragmented pieces can be put back together anew and in a way that offers membership to all of Germany's citizens.

135 'I was also one of the many moles in the city. We made sure that the ground upon which the new capital was to be built, remained loose and perilously soft. We loved the sandy soil of the Mark (Brandenburg).' 84

CHAPTER IV. Terezia Mora's Alle Tage: B. as in Balkan

Das Land spuckt dich aus, die Dorfer jagen dich davon, aber hier kannst du bleiben und mit mir zusammen in zehn, zwanzig Jahren sagen: WeiBt du noch, damals, als wir in der puliserendsten Metropole ihrer Hemisphare lebten? (Mora, Alle Tage 96, emphasis in original)136

As was the case for Tawada, Terezia Mora's writing initially seems to be marked by a concerted effort to dislocate geographical places. As I argue in this chapter, however,

Mora's novel Alle Tage actually tackles the question of how to re-localize both its main character Abel and Berlin. For most of the novel, Abel cannot arrive in a 1990s European

Berlin that apparently has left the postwar era behind. Such an arrival would only be possible by means of a violent act of forgetting both Berlin's own past and more importantly, former Yugoslavia's present. Embodying the war, Abel allows Mora to critique the fact that the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s have been instrumentalized by the Berlin Republic's quest to define itself as a post-postwar country. As Abel and his experiences reveal and despite all claims to the contrary, Germany and Europe have not arrived in a time that is after wars.

136 'The country spits you out, the villages chase you away, but here you can stay, and join me in ten, twenty years time, saying: Do you still remember, back then, when we lived together in the most pulsating metropolis of its hemisphere'; All translations from the German are mine. While there is a 2007 translation of the novel, called Day in, Day out by Michael Henry Heim, I prefer my own translations. 85

Towards a Yugoslavian Turn

As one of Terezia Mora's characters in Alle Tage points out, many Germans were baffled at how a civil war could break out "praktisch vor unserer Haustiir" (AT 14),137 since wars are not supposed to take place near Germany at the dawn of the 21st century. Yet, no matter how comfortingly far away the term 'the Balkans,' today representing a

"Problemregion" detached from any concrete place (Previsic, "Frage" 95), may have tried to render the territories of former Yugoslavia, its wars were indeed in Europe.138 As this chapter will argue, Terezia Mora's novel implies that the Yugoslavian war is in fact very significant for reunified Berlin as a symbol for Germany and Europe's entrance into the post-Cold-War era.

The connection between German speaking countries and the former Yugoslavia is of course partly historical. At the latest in 1878, the Austro-Hungarian Empire consolidated its presence on the Balkan peninsula with the annexation of Bosnia and

Herzegovina (Previsic, "Frage" 96). After the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and a period of self-government, Nazi Germany occupied Yugoslavia (or rather the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that had been formed in 1918) in the spring of 1941. The territories of Yugoslavia were then divided between the axis powers, with the German

Reich expanding to include a large part of Slovenia, and puppet states such as so-called

Nazi Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro being established. By the 1990s, with the post-

137 'I still can't believe it, practically in front of our own house!;' All translations from the German are mine. However, there is a 2007 translation of the novel, called Day in, Day out by Michael Henry Heim. 138 In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova convincingly argues that the wars in former Yugoslavia should not be called Balkan wars. Not only do the Balkans include other countries such as Bulgaria and Greece but the term itself is a construct created for political and ideological purposes, which Todorova calls Balkanism, a term partly inspired by Said's Orientalism (Todorova iv). I am using the term Balkans with this knowledge in mind to reference a Western ideological construct rather than a geo-political region. 86

WWII Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's gradual disintegration, Yugoslavian territories once more became important for Germany. This time, they served as a means for the reunified Germany to redefine its image in external affairs starting with the premature recognition of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 and culminating in the German sector in the protectorate Kosovo in 1999 (Previsic, "Frage" 96). Thus, the territories of former Yugoslavia have a long history of serving as the private Orient and projection- screen of German speaking countries (Previsic, "Poetic" 190-1).139

In addition, the German-Yugoslav connection of the 1990s has been established by the fact that Germany received a large number of refugees and asylum seekers from former Yugoslavia. Despite resettlement initiatives and sizable political pressure by the

German government, there still remained almost 700,000 individuals with passports from former Yugoslavian countries in Germany in 2008.140 While public consciousness - and literary critics - tend to focus on Berlin as the home of Turkish-Germans, Berliners with passports from Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, and Kosovo and their culture have received surprisingly scant attention.141 Yet, former Yugoslavians, with a combined number of more than 42,000 members,142 actually constitute the second largest group of

139 In order to highlight German-language literary Balkanism, Previsic points to popular travel accounts, novels, and remembrance literature published about the 'orientalized' Balkans by Heinrich Renner, Robert Michel, Friedrich Oppenheimer, or Hermann Wendel ("Poetik" 191). 140 See "Deutschland Land und Leute 2009," posted on the website of the Statistisches Bundesamt, http://www.destatis.de/; Between 1991 and 1995, Berlin alone took in 29,294 civil war refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina (Mihok 9). 141 That is not to say that writers from former Yugoslavia have been wholly ignored. For instance, Marica Bodrozic, Marian Nakitsch, and Sasa Stanisic are successful German-language writers. 142 These come from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia (including former Serbia and Montenegro as well as Kosovo). See the press release "Uber 460,000 Auslander aus 186 Staaten in Berlin gemeldet," published on the website of the Amt fur Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, http://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/. 87 foreigners in Berlin today (Piening 161).143 Therefore, it is worthwhile asking, as Boris

Previsic does alluding to Adelson's Turkish Turn, if there will soon be a Yugoslavian

Turn in Berlin literature. Given the large number of immigrants from the former

Yugoslavia in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, such a turn seems feasible for

German-language literature at large, which will be forced by sheer demographic realities to confront the Balkans as a cultural factor (Previsic, "Poetik" 190).

The relationship between Berlin and the Balkans in Mora's novel is however more complicated than mere historical or demographic circumstance. In fact, Terezia

Mora makes a concerted effort to avoid reducing the connection between contemporary

Berlin and the Yugoslavian wars to this level. Thus, she never clearly identifies the temporal and spatial settings of the novel. In a manner rather typical of the work, the narrator starts with a Benjaminian "Nennen wir die Zeit jetzt, nennen wir den Ort hier"

(AT9).144 Similarly, the protagonist's hometown is merely identified as "S." (86, 236); his compatriots come from "B." (236); and the setting is in the 13 years surrounding the year "199x" in yet another city called "B." (74, 139). One might suggest, taking the lead from the author herself, that these truncated city names indicate that "wir reden hier nicht von den Balkankriegen, sondern von alien moglichen Kriegen. Wir reden hier nicht von

Berlin, 1991-2004, sondern von einer westlichen GroBstadt unserer Zeit" (Mora in Kraft

107).145 Like Andrea Geier, one could thus argue that the specific political backdrop of the war in former Yugoslavia is used merely to exemplify the difficulties faced by ethnic

143 Serbs alone make up the third largest group of immigrants to Berlin after Polish people with 21,000. Moreover, one should keep in mind that Yugoslavians had already established their presence in both Germany and Berlin as the second largest group of guest-workers by the 1970s (Beer, Deniz, and Schwedler 137). 144 'Let us call the time now, let us call the place here.' 145 '[W]e are here not talking about the Balkan War, but rather about all possible wars. We are also not talking about Berlin from 1991-2004 but about a Western city of our times.' 88 and religious minorities in any of today's Western countries ("Niemand" 167).146

However, here it helps to consider Mora's position in the larger context of the literature of migration. Even more so than Yoko Tawada, Mora vehemently objects to being categorized as an author of Migrationsliteratur. For instance, during a roundtable discussion with other authors with migration background such as Wladimir Kaminer,

Imran Ayata, and Navid Kermani, Mora insists that she is at least as German as Kafka, even coming from the same geographical area (Mora, "Ich bin" 28). She feels that the attempt to brand writers like herself as alienated foreigners is driven by a feeling of alienation Germans carry within themselves (Biendarra 5). Moreover, Mora does not want to inhabit a representative position, emphasizing that: "Mein Beruf ist

Schriftstellerin! Nicht: Berufsossi, Berfusauslanderin, Berufsfrau oder gar- fraulein!

Macht's euch doch selbst, Betonkopfe!" (Mora, "Kreter-Spiel" ll).147 In addition, Mora also has no pretensions of competing with the Tagesschau (Mora in Kraft 107) and understandably does not want her writing to be reduced to documenting mere socio- historical fact. Not interested in being branded a foreigner, an East-European writer, nor in figuring as a public intellectual, Mora claims that she was simply interested in producing a complex novel when writing Alle Tage.148

146 Paralleling Mora, Geier claims that abbreviating all town or city names indicates that Mora's writing is not about describing one particular city or country. The contemporary political background of the narrated events, the former Yugoslavia and the wars on the Balkans, are "vielmehr beispielhaft fiir die Probleme ethnischer und religioser Minderheiten aufgrund sich neu strukturierender staatlicher Ordnungen und Grenzen" ("Niemand" 167). 'rather exemplary for the problems of ethnic and religious minorities that result from newly structured national arrangements and borders' 147 'I am a professional writer! Not a professional East-German, a professional foreigner, a professional woman, or even '-fraulein.' Why don't you do it yourself, you pigheads!' 148 Mora's vehement attempts to distance herself from her biography of course raise the question of how she reconciles herself with having accepted the Adelbert von Chamisso prize in 2000, which is explicitly awarded to German-language authors whose first language is not German. 89

Carmine Chiellino argues that Terezia Mora belongs to those authors whose first novels, in opposition to the writers' intentions, fail to distance themselves from the themes and aesthetic models of what he calls intercultural literature in German, because of these author's "interkulturellen Lebenslauf, der sie thematisch und asthetisch dazu verfuhrt, interkulturell vorzugehen" (Chiellino 73).149 While Chiellino's claim about the inevitability of such a failure is arguable,150 his observation that Alle Tage is marked by intercultural themes and aesthetics is correct. As Mora herself points out in an interview,

Alle Tage is a novel that explicitly thematizes the foreigner, which is therefore certainly a legitimate topic for literary criticism (Biendarra 6). Born in Sopron, Hungary, in a

German community, which she left for Berlin in 1990,151 Mora is aware of the fact that while her writing cannot be reduced to her biographical details, she is nevertheless "ein

Kind seiner Zeit. Man kann vielleicht den Glauben verlieren, aber nicht die Herkunft.

Man kann nicht nicht wissen, was man weiB, und selbst das, was man nicht weiB, hinterlasst seine Spuren" (Mora, "Kreter-Spiel" 12).152

149 'to avoid the themes and aesthetic models inherent in the intercultural literature written in German'; Chiellino lists other authors such as Zsuzsa Bank, Marica Bodrozic, Jagoda Marinic, and Sudabeh Mohafez as further examples. 150 Based on considerations of monolingual versus bilingual or trilingual competency, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this dissertation, Chiellino argues that the "ersehnte Berufsidentitat, deutsche Schriftstellerin ohne wenn und aber zu sein, scheitert grundsatzlich an der existentiellen Unmoglichkeit, einen gereiften interkulturellen Lebenslauf monokulturell, d.h. monolingual auszuleben"(73). 151 In Berlin, Mora first studied Hungarian studies and drama at the Humboldt University, and then scriptwriting at the German Academy of Film and Television. Besides prose ficiton, Mora has written TV scripts, plays, and continues to translate Hungarian literary works, most notably those of Peter Esterhazy, into German. Her first collection of short stories, Seltsame Materie (1999) won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1999 as well as the Adelbert-von-Chamisso- Forderpreis in 2000. Her first novel Alle Tage (2004) has won several prizes, including the Leipzig Bookfair prize in 2005. Her second novel, Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent, has been published in the late summer of 2009. 152 'a child of one's time. One can perhaps lose one's faith, but never one's origin. One cannot not know, what one knows, and even that which one does not know leaves its traces.' 90

The ambiguous nature of Mora's view of the relationship between her writing and her biography casts a different light on her emphatic insistence that the setting of Alle

Tage is not Berlin. Her decision to write Alle Tage about a city B. and a war in an anonymous country not her own, should not be viewed as an outcome of her attempts at universalization. Rather, this move can more convincingly be attributed to her somewhat misplaced efforts to distance herself from the literature of migration and any biographical connections.1531 use the term misplaced efforts because, despite authorial intention, Alle

Tage is in fact a part of German literature precisely because the city of "B." is Berlin and the anonymous country at war is indeed former Yugoslavia. Put differently, Alle Tage is, despite all claims to the contrary, an important part of Berlin literature, and not merely part of a European, Western, or even what Elke Sturm-Trigonakis calls a new world- literature. Rather than dealing with the concerns of any city in our times, the themes that preoccupy the novel are specifically German, or more precisely, the themes of the Berlin

Republic. As a matter of fact, de-localizing the novel from this context is directly opposed to the re-localizing efforts that dominate the text itself, a point on which I will elaborate below.

Abel's Placeless Silence

First, an admittedly simplified version of the novel's plot: Alle Tage tells the story of

Abel Nema, who at 19 years of age leaves his country for the summer to look for his father, who had left when he was still a child. During this trip, Abel has an accident from which he awakes with the miraculous ability to quickly understand and leam any

153 In order to illustrate her point in "Kreter-Spiel" that her writing is not autobiographical, Mora attaches a few paragraphs from Alle Tage at the end. 91 language to perfection. While he is still in hospital, he is told that war has broken out back home, that he has been drafted, and that he therefore should not return home but try his luck in another country in the city of B. Once in B., Abel uses his new ability and learns ten languages, allegedly writes a dissertation in comparative linguistics, enters a sham marriage for immigration purposes, and in the end loses his memory, including his languages, as a result of injuries sustained in an attack by a group of teenage compatriots.

All of this is basically summarized in the opening pages of the novel, which begins almost at the narrative end and proceeds via flashbacks to various non-chronological temporal points in the past to flesh out the thirteen years that pass between Abel's accident and his encounter with violence.154

Even though Alle Tage is therefore the tale of a war-refugee, it is by no means a specimen of Betrojfenheitsliteratur. When Abel arrives in his new home country, a compatriot voices the view that Abel has "die gleichen Probleme wie jeder Emigrant: er braucht Papiere und er braucht Sprache" (AT 13).155 Yet, Abel is curiously never in need of anything. He learns the local language, as well as many others, to perfection; a professor continually supplies him with references without ever seeing a single page of his work; translation jobs fall into his lap; and he is offered everything one could need wherever he goes, including his sham marriage. As the narrator points out with habitual metafictional irony: Abel "wanderte wie eine Stafette von Hand zu Hand, als ware es irgendwo so abgesprochen gewesen, gut organisiert, es war immer einer da" (340).156

Mora's Abel thus has little in common with the downtrodden Ali of earlier

154 See Kraft and Miiller-Dannhausen for detailed analyses of the novel's narrative and temporal structure. 155 'the same problems as any immigrant: he needs papers and he needs language' 156 'passed from hand to hand like a baton in a relay race, as if it had all been organized somewhere, pre-arranged' 92

Gastarbeiterliteratur or other more typical accounts of life as an immigrant and refugee in a Germany that does not yet view itself as a country of immigration. In fact, when

Abel does become the victim of violence, the perpetrators are not Germans but youths from his own home country. Instead of posing a problem, Abel in fact represents the ideal immigrant who has mastered the hurdles of integration, identified by the German Federal

Ministry for Migration and Refugees as consisting mainly of "language acquisition and the integration into the labour market" (BAMF).

And yet, despite meeting all prerequisites for successfully settling into the host country and despite the added bonus of being a polite, gentle, and strikingly good-looking young man, Abel remains an Other whose presence stirs up strong emotions, be they positive or negative (AT 13). It is as if, as his wife observes, Abel carried "den Geruch der Fremde" in his pockets (17).157 His alterity is the more unsettling since it is hard to define.158 As a cab driver observes, Abel "muss aus dem Himmel gefallen sein oder aus der Holle gefahren, als er in das Auto einstieg, war er noch kein ganzer Mensch" (337-

8).159 The unsettling feeling that Abel is not from here - or, for that matter, neither from a concrete there - also stems from Abel's strikingly perfect command of his various languages. The way in which he speaks them is so perfect, so "ohne Ort, so klar, wie man

157 'the scent of foreignness' 158 Abel's unsettling ambiguity is stressed throughout the novel. According to Todorova's definition of Balkanism, a similar ambiguity is attributed to the Balkans: "Unlike orientalism, which is a discourse about imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity. [...] Because of their indefinable character, persons or phenomena in transitional states, like in marginal ones, are considered dangerous, both being in danger themselves and emanating danger to others" (Todorova 17). 159 'must have fallen from the sky or risen from hell, when he got into the car, he was not yet fully human' 93 es noch nie gehort hat, kein Akzent, kein Dialekt, nichts - er spricht wie einer, der nirgends herkommt" (13).160

Abel is of course literally without a place. As he tells his future wife, the country that he left had in the meantime been split up "in drei bis fiinf neue Staaten," none of which were of the opinion that they owed someone like Abel citizenship (269).161

Without citizenship, Abel does not exist before the law. When he and his wife attempt to divorce, the judge observes that Abel's expired passport is from a country that no longer exists, which renders his papers invalid and in turn prevents the judge from divorcing them because one cannot divorce someone "der gar nicht existiert" (49). It is however not only due to geopolitical forces that Abel is without place. It is his language itself which is placeless, and which ultimately renders Abel mute and once more non-existent.

This is already implied in Abel's surname Nema. According to Abel's roommate

Konstantin, it means "der Stumme, verwandt mit dem slawischen Nemec, heute fur: der

Deutsche, friiher fur jeden nichtslawischer Zunge, fur den Stummen also" (14).163 Even though Abel flawlessly speaks any language he chooses to learn, he hardly ever speaks.

Christ-like, Abel awakes after three days in a coma to the Pentecostal miracle of being able to speak in all tongues. Like Julia Kristeva's foreigner, Abel is literally resurrected into a new language (Kristeva 15). Yet, as for Kristeva's foreigner, this resurrection

160 'without place, as clear as one had never heard them, no accent, no dialect, nothing- he speaks like someone who comes from nowhere' 161 'into three to five new states'; This episode alludes to the contested repatriation of Berlin Roma, which was initiated in the second half of the 1990s and was part of a public discussion in Berlin at the time referenced in the novel. Repatriation of ex-Yugoslavians, and particularly Roma, begs the question of how one can ask someone to re-settle to a state that did not previously exist. More concretely, the resettlement is a humanitarian issue since the civil rights of the Roma people are not guaranteed in the receiving countries. 162 'who doesn't even exist' 163 'Nema, the mute, related etymologically to the Slavic word Nemec, today meaning: the German; originally for any non-Slavic language speaker or people; so Nemec as in the mute' 94 eventually leads to a retreat into silence. Abel's new languages, despite or indeed because of the perfection with which he speaks them, remain as abstract to him as to those who eventually study his polyglot mind, classifying his language into LI, L2, L3, and so on.

Abel's languages are, in Kristeva's words, "cut off from the body's nocturnal memory"

(15) because a shiny bright resurrection is simply not the same as messy birth, the mother-tongue not that easily replaced. The ink Abel uses to stain his tongue for comparing imprints does little to change this (AT 101); nor does it help that the only landscape Abel is familiar with in his host country is the one of alveoli, palate, and larynx

(100). Abel is able to speak, but he does not make use of this ability. And since Abel does not speak, he does not exist, because, as an ironic narrator twisting the cogito, points out:

"Die Zeichen der Zeit sind Kommunikation. Jeder, der sich aufiert, ist willkommen, wir sprechen, also sind wir" (404).164 Since Abel does not speak, he is not.

Even after marrying and thus obtaining valid papers, Abel remains without a place and communication. At best, he speaks to his step-son Omar - but he does so in a secret language only known to the two of them, which excludes the possibility of founding a community through communication.165 Like a twisted Robinson Crusoe, Abel chooses to live in an illegal flat in a dead-end street overlooking railway tracks in a

164 'Communication is the sing of the times: anyone with anything to say is welcome; we speak, therefore we are.' 165 In the novel, it is unclear but implied that Abel is not actually teaching Omar Russian, which is the pretext under which the two meet once a week (323). As Mora confirms in an interview, the two in fact speak an invented language (Kraft 106). Linguistic unity was very important for 19th- century nationalist movements in both Germany and Yugoslavia, which were based on "Romantic/Herderian definitions of nationhood as cultural community based on language" (Sofos 237) and on notions of pan-Slavism. This renders Abel's decision to speak a secret language with Omar and his refusal to practice the other languages he speaks, understandable. While not explicitly referring to Peter Handke's controversial position on the war, Mora here also seems to agree with his repeated claim that it is language that suffered the most from the wars in former Yugoslavia (Handke 61). Abused for nationalist purposes, language itself seems to have become suspect to Abel. 95 former industrial area called the "Insel der Tapferen" (20).166 Even though he walks the city for years, he effectively only moves within three city blocks so that Abel may as well have lived "in einem Dorf, auf einer winzigen Insel" (159).167 Or he may just as well never have left his home city, which is described as a small "Stadt mit Sackbahnhof [...], eine ruhige, dunkle Insel" (24).168 That neither island is cozy or a sanctuary in any positive sense is to be expected. Like Tawada's text, Mora's does not celebrate Abel's island existence as some form of Braidotti's "[o]ases of non-belonging, spaces of detachment. No-(wo)man's lands" (10). Granted, Abel certainly mimics nomadic consciousness to some extent. His whole existence is about "transitions and passages without predetermined destinations or lost homelands" and in his lack of attachment, he is like Braidotti's rootless nomads whose "ruthlessness [...] can be shocking" (25). Yet, this ruthlessness also robs Abel of any form of substantiality. As his friend Kinga points out, Abel's seemingly unconscious exercise of freedom with its complete disregard for others, makes him a "Fata Morgana" (Mora, AT 299), or, as mentioned above, as ephemeral as an angel or demon.

But if Abel is an angel, he is unable to fly. When he accidentally acquires a passport with a valid visa, he realizes that he is now free to go "iiberallhin" (anywhere)

(245). He then hitchhikes randomly throughout the country and its neighbouring states, going wherever his respective driver is going, so that the initial everywhere becomes an anywhere. Moreover, Abel stays within the Schengen area, going only as far as he can go

166 'Island of the Brave'; Insel der Tapferen is a 1951 novel by Erich Kern (Erich Knud Kernmayr), an Austrian communist turned SS of relative notoriety, who wrote mainly "nationalsozialistisch durchsetzte Rechtfertigungsliteratur" after 1950 (Gradwohl-Schlacher 121). An allusion to this revisionist author makes sense considering the many connections politicians and the media have made between Nazi Germany and the Serbs. 167 'in a village, on a tiny island' 168 'city with a dead-end railway station [...], a quiet, dark island' 96 without having to actually use the passport (339). The "iiberallhin" thus acquires the same quality as the "nirgendwohin" of Abel's youth. For five years Abel walked the streets of his hometown with his friend and object of affection, Ilia. At every street corner, Ilia turns according to what he perceives to be signs from God, hoping to thereby prove his faith, and is followed by Abel (28). When repeatedly questioned by two plainclothes policemen about where they are going, the boys answer: "nirgendwohin"

(121). Similarly, Abel's newly acquired freedom to go anywhere recalls the

"allumfassende Vorlaufigkeit der absoluten Freiheit eines Lebens ohne gliltige

Dokumente" that follows his childhood of entrapment in a dictatorship (403).169 The freedom to go absolutely anywhere is therefore equated with the freedom from decision­ making when one is allowed to go nowhere. As Mora suggests, neither freedom is free in a positive sense of the word.

In B., Abel's restricted movement is also due to his inability to orient himself, an ability he lost upon gaining his miraculous linguistic abilities. Even though he has not left the city for several years (297) and has been walking through it day after day and night after night (158), Abel acquires only a vague mental map of his surroundings. He becomes used to "nicht mehr als eine Vorstellung davon zu haben, wo er sich gerade befand. Er orientierte sich anhand einiger signifikanter Landmarken [...]. Dazwischen sahen die meisten Ecken so aus, als ware er gerade erst da gewesen. Wandeln durch ein permanentes Dejavu" (159).170 Walking the city streets night after night without ever arriving anywhere, Abel paradoxically comes to embody a critique of a society that

169 'the all-encompassing temporariness of the absolute freedom of a life without valid papers' 170 'not having more than a vague idea of where he was at a given moment. He used a few significant landmarks for orientation. [...] Between those, most street corners looked as if he had just been there a moment ago. Strolling through a permanent deja-vu.' 97 celebrates and requires continual mobility from its members (see also Kraft 41). Abel's permanent deja-vu in fact recalls the rather uncanny comfort derived from ordering a

Caramel Macciato in Boston, Istanbul and Berlin, the strange aura of airports around the globe that Marc Auge identifies as non-places, or the ever same business centers frequented without ever seeing the cities they are located in. Rather than being torn between two worlds, an image previously associated with the immigrant, Abel is and remains like Kristeva's foreigner someone whom "nothing ties [...] there anymore, and, so far, nothing binds [...] here. Always elsewhere, the foreigner belongs no-where"

(Kristeva 10).171 With his poverty in emotional ties and his wealth in languages, Abel in fact would have all the prerequisites for being the new kind of migrant so in demand in today's economy: the flexible, mobile, multilingual, trans- or indeed post-national global employee, whose being at home nowhere is, as the novel suggests, rather mistakenly equated with his ability to be at home everywhere.172

Abel with an Accent

The novel certainly does not advocate a return to a home nation or a conception of roots based on religious, ethnic, or linguistic identity as alternatives to such a free-floating

171 "Es ist kein Wunder, dass in dieser Zwischenwelt von illegalen Dachgeschosswohnungen, ziellosen Nachtwanderungen und sumpfigen Kellerclubs die Stadt in ihrer konkreten Form abhanden kommt. Man muss sagen: dem Leser abhanden kommt. Fur Abel selbst scheint sie kaum je existiert zu haben, sie konkretisiert sich nicht. 'B.' bleibt die groBe Unbekannte, der Ort, an dem Abel niemals ankommt" (Kraft 42). 'It is no wonder that the city in its concrete form disappears in this netherworld of illegal attic apartments, aimless nightly strolls, and seedy basement clubs. One has to say: disappears for the reader. For Abel himself, it never really existed, it does not become concrete. 'B.' remains the great unknown, the place at which Abel never arrives.' 172 Braidotti, for instance, asserts that, as "an intellectual style, nomadism consists not so much in being homeless, as in being capable of recreating your home everywhere. The nomad carries her/his essential belongings with her/him wherever s/he goes and can recreate a home base anywhere" (16). 98 global nomadic existence. The wars in former Yugoslavia have amply illustrated that the dangers of this form of belonging do not lurk far beneath the surface of contemporary

European nation states. Thus, all the major incidences of violence in the novel are connected to the conflict in Abel's home country.173 Abel's trip with Kinga's musician friends, who are also from his native country, ends following a violent encounter when one of the musicians, who is provoked by a compatriot rather disparagingly described as carrying a leather pouch around his neck, which in all probability contains "Heimaterde" or 'native soil' (AT 233). The latter repeatedly requests that the musicians play "die

Falken" (235). This eventually escalates into a confrontation with near-fatal injuries, which becomes more understandable considering that 'the Falcons' or Sokol is a 19th- century nationalist Slavic gymnastic society, which combined "mass physical exercises in a military spirit with liberal, nationalistic and pan-Slavic ideas" and eventually promoted the unification of all Serbs (Prlenda 87). Pan-Slavism is a sore topic for the musicians and

Abel. It is the mention of the pan-Slavic spirit that allows the reader a rare insight into

Abel's psyche, when Abel reacts by thinking: "Der panslawische Gedanke kann mich mit hundert Zungen am After lecken. Sieh an, wenn es darauf ankommt, kann ich Gedanken haben"(l 14).174 The violence inherent in any attempts to forge identity based on linguistic or ethnic belonging is also vividly exemplified in the Roma boy Danko's story.

In an intensely graphic scene, Danko divulges gory fantasies of dismembering his brutally abusive father, who is unable to deal with having been exiled from their home

173 The notion of the biblical Abel as the first victim of human violence foreshadows and affirms Abel as a victim. Abel's friend Kinga also makes the musicians responsible for Abel, whose indifferent response to where he went after the violent escapade reminds of Cain's question of whether he is his brother's keeper. 174 'The Pan-Slavic spirit can lick my ass with a hundred tongues. Look, I can have thoughts when it matters.' 99 country on account of being Roma (185, 203). However, Mora does not suggest that things would be better had they never been forced to leave home. Rather, Danko's father is also suspected of already having buried a body back there. That any simplistic return home is not an option, moreover becomes apparent considering that Kinga, the only character whose wish to return home is granted, does so in an urn after having committed suicide after a long period of intense homesickness and despair over the wars (353).

While the novel criticizes simple notions of home, establishing new communities based on non-negotiable identity markers such as religion, ethnicity, or language, as well as free-floating global nomadism as viable forms of belonging, it does not directly propose any alternatives. ButAlle Tage does suggest that the destructive effects of derealization can only be addressed in tandem with healing Abel's sensory numbness. In the novel, Abel's solution comes partly in the form of Omar, his little step-son-to-be.

Omar, whose Arabic name means "Losung, Mittel, Ausweg" (166),175 steps onto Abel's island without asking permission by taking Abel by the hand to show him around as a matter of course. Positively surprised, Abel wonders: "Wann war man, er, ich, das letzte

Mai so lange in Beriihrung mit jemandem? Jemals? [...] Das istfast das Merkwiirdigste, was mir bis jetzt widerfahren ist. Andererseits hat es auch etwas unerklarlich Gutes"

(166).176 Omar, by means of a Merleau-Pontyean touch, reestablishes some form of a subjectivity for Abel,177 who goes from the generic 'one' to the third-person masculine

175 'solution, means, way out' 176 'When was the last time that one, he, I was in physical contact with someone for so long? Ever? [...] This is almost the strangest thing that has happened to me so far. On the other hand, there is also something inexplicably good about it.' 177 Merleau-Ponty's image of one hand touching the other, in which the hand that is touched is simultaneously touching, destroys any presumed binary between subject and object. Both hands are subjects in an Althusserean sense since both are subjected. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is 100

'he' to an T - an 'I' the existence and contours of which are in doubt for much of the novel. This phenomenological reading of the passage seems warranted considering the parallels as well as differences between the first meetings of Abel and Ilia in contrast to the one between Abel and Omar. Both encounters are described as Abel having been chosen amongst many. However, whereas Omar's act of choosing is physical and affirms

Abel's own subjectivity by the simultaneity of being touched and actively touching, Ilia 17R in stark contrast and to the torment of Abel remains physically distant. Instead of affirming Abel's self, Ilia, upon hearing Abel's last name, asks: "Und Nema. So wie das

Nichts?" (27).179

Sensory experience such as touch is central to Abel's transformation towards the end of the novel, the last chapter of which is not coincidentally called "Ausgang" (the way out) (412). After his first accident, Abel awakes after three days to the miracle of being able to understand all languages at the expense of his senses of taste, smell, and clear vision (89, 118). When Abel awakes the second time from a three-day-long and near fatal drug-induced delirium, he has regained his sensual apparatus. On account of what the narrator chooses to call a miracle (418), Abel regains "seine gesamte

Wahrnehmung, Sinne, Bewusstsein" and now sees, smells, and touches like other people and unlike he had done in 13 years (418).180 Once he regains his body, Abel's speech also acquires what his wife describes as a "kaum vorhandenen, kaum horbaren, nur

particularly relevant for this novel given his general focus on human beings as first and foremost embodied beings in time and space; perceivers who hear, smell, taste, see and touch. 178 Abel is focused on Ilia's body and his desire for it (29) and feels the "highest joy" when he finally catches a glimpse of Ilia's tongue during his mushroom high (400). 179 'And Nema. As in nothingness (the void)?' 180 'his entire perceptual apparatus, his senses, his consciousness' 101 spiirbaren" accent (419).181 Initially thinking that he can cure this accent with a sip of

water, Abel realizes that the change lies beneath and is something that one cannot simply

wash away like the ink Abel had used to stain his mouth (419). Rather, this is a bodily

"Verwandlung" or transformation (419).

Arguing for the importance of the body also qualifies the otherwise potentially problematic ending of the novel, in which Abel stays married to Mercedes and fathers a child with her. The nature of Abel's unfulfilled sexual desire for boys and the one of his attraction to Omar, his step-son, remain ambiguous throughout the novel. Not only is his attraction to men unclear, but it is also never acted upon. Rather, in line with the rest of his body, Abel seems to suppress his sexuality and never dares to do more than look. In a sense, he is therefore asexual and even a-gendered, which is confirmed by Janda who observes the "merkwiirdige, zweigeschlechtliche Resonanz" in Abel's voice (226).182

Rather than constituting a comment on homo- or heterosexual orientations or the ultimate assimilation into a normative middle-class family, the novel's end and Abel's act of fathering a child affirm the importance of the body and its desires. In line with the novel's other critiques of the possibility of borderless living, the ending also plays with the notion that while one can cross gender lines, one cannot change one's sex. After all, for Abel, the journey from a one leads to an I via a he (166).

After the attack, Abel not only regains his senses and acquires an accent, but he also witnesses the return of his ability to orient himself (425). This becomes meaningful considering that, during his delirium, Abel finally confronts the fact that for the past 13 years he has resided in a self-created fatherland, his own "neues Vaterland: die Scham.

181 'hardly existent, hardly audible, merely to be sensed"; The German adjective 'spiirbar' translates both as 'marked, distinct' and 'perceptible, tangible'. 182 'curious, hermaphroditic resonance' 102

Erniedrigende, verzweifelte Scham. Dass ich herkomme, wo ich herkomme. Dass passiert ist, was passiert ist" (406). He has never arrived in Germany but rather remained in a country of his own making. It is only after confronting and thus dealing with his past, that

Abel is able to leave behind both his native country and his second, chosen fatherland, finally to arrive, body and mind, in the city of B. - a place with smells, sounds, and some degree of legibility. Embodied, he thus also becomes emplaced, "verortet," accent included.

A Balkan Berlin Republic

Yet, as mentioned above, Abel's story does not end here. A few hours after regaining his senses, Abel is brutally beaten by a gang of Roma youths he had encountered at a previous point and left to die taped head down to a jungle gym. As a result, Abel is suffering from aphasia, which Omar explains to be from the Greek "phanai, sprechen.

Verlust des Sprech- aber auch, im iibertragenen Sinne, des Urteilsvermogens. Kurz: Er hat seine Sprache verloren" (427).184 In addition, Abel suffers from amnesia and thus is unable to remember his name, where he comes from, and the languages he once spoke, including his mother tongue. The only language he manages to partly recover is the local one, the language of his new country, in which he remains married to Mercedes, fathers a child, and where he is most happy when given the chance to say his favorite sentence

"Das ist gut" (430).185 The parallels between his accident and his being attacked 13 years later suggest that this final conclusion can be read as a positive one, or at least as the most

183 'new fatherland: shame. Degrading, desperate shame. That I come from where I come from. That what has happened, has happened.' 184 'phanai, to speak. Loss of the faculty of speech but also, in the figurative sense, of the faculty of judgment. In short: He lost his language.' 185 'That is good.' 103 positive one possible, despite having the unpleasant air of a normalizing assimilation previously mentioned. After his accident, Abel wakes up to three men staring at him and upon realizing his new talent, the narrator comments: "war es gut, war es schlecht, wer weiB, es war das, was moglich war" (86).186 After the attack Abel is found by three women, to whom he says in a moment of lucidity: "Ja, das ist gut. Es ist gut" (427), which becomes his favorite sentence. Like the creator god of Genesis, Abel now finds

"dass es gut war"1 87 - or at least as good as the world was until Adam and Eve sinned and

Abel was murdered by his brother.

It is significant that Abel is nearly killed by his own countrymen,188 since it points to the importance of the civil war, the ensuing ethnic cleansing, and Germany's intervention in former Yugoslavia for the novel. While concrete references to the wars in the territory of former Yugoslavia are sparse and individual players are only identified by their initials, the references that are made raise the specter of genocide haunting the conflict. After Abel awakes from his delirium and switches on the radio for the first time in 13 years, the newscast reports on Slobodan Milosevic's trail and discusses the question of immunity from prosecution for genocide for heads of state (417). Similarly, the dialogue illustrating Kinga's decline into insanity is interspersed with news-items about

Dusko Tadic's trail in Germany (291).189

186 'was it good, was it bad, who knows, it was what was possible' 187 In Genesis, the sentence "Und Gott sah, daB es gut war" is repeated each time after God creates the light, earth, sea, creatures, etc. (The Access Bible, Gen. 1.4-31). Abel's also repeatedly uses the word 'gut' to assess positive events upon first meeting Omar. 188 Abel at one time states that they share the same mother tongue (198). 189 Janda reads a newspaper that mentions "Dusko T. - Andre: Das Schwein... - ist in elf von einunddreiBig Anklagepunkten fur schuldig befunden worden" (291). Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb, was tried as a war criminal, sentenced to 25 years in 1997, and held in a prison in Germany until his early release in 2008. http://www.trial-ch.org/de/trial-watch/profil/db/ facts/ dusko _ tadic_190.html 104

The significance of the Yugoslavian wars, and the genocide in particular, for the self-definition of the Berlin Republic should not be underestimated. This becomes particularly evident after the 1998 election of the Red-Green coalition. Going against previously rather pacifist tenets of his Green party, as foreign affairs minister Joschka

Fischer supported military intervention in Kosovo. He partly justified this by drawing explicit parallels between Milosevic and Hitler, Greater Serbia and Greater Germany.190

This was to some extent a self-serving move on behalf of the new Red-Green leadership, which was eager to overcome international suspicions of its parties' pacifist and socialist pasts and felt the need to signal that Red-Green Germany has "finally and safely arrived in the West, learned the lessons of the past, and [is] part of a contemporary anti-Hitler coalition" (Heinemann-Griider 38). Comparing Kosovo and the Holocaust has, however, more far-reaching implications for how the Berlin Republic chooses to approach its Nazi past. As Daniel Becker points out, finding a common root for both events in exaggerated nationalism rather than anti-Semitism implies that "(hyper-) nationalism was indeed not a problem of German history alone" (348). Comparing the Holocaust and Nazi extermination to the events in the Kosovo thus implicitly ends the decades-long practice of viewing Germany's crimes as a singular event in world history (350), effectively claiming divergence from Germany's Sonderweg in this regard. Rather than finding fault with German history or culture as such, one could now point to other genocides and a common inhumanity. The wars in former Yugoslavia have thus somewhat perversely aided Germany in moving beyond its own postwar era, in what Habermas critically calls

190 In the Newsweek interview in question, Fischer also states that he sees a direct "parallel to that primitive fascism," that "[o]bviously, the '30s are back," and that NATO has to intervene due to his generation's promise of "Never again Auschwitz" (Weymouth 30). 105 the process of 'normalizing' the Berlin Republic.191 But, as Mora's novel seems to point out, residing in the beyond necessitates a fair share of forgetting.

Initially, the fall of the Berlin wall and the peaceful reunification of Germany instilled European-wide optimism for a peaceful future, propelling Europe beyond the postwar and Cold War era (Deupmann 3). Wars and crimes against humanity were supposed to be remnants of a distant past. World War II was now indeed so far past that

"for the first time since joining NATO in 1955, Germany participated in a major combat operation without a proper UN Security Council mandate—thereby breaking a long-held tradition" by sending German fighter jets to Operation Allied Force to Kosovo (Harnisch

36, Dalgaard-Nielsen 339).192 While the German public was still strongly opposed to sending German troops during the Gulf War in 1991, there was now "broad public support" for sending them to Kosovo (Harnisch 41).193 As the character of Eric in Alle

Tage points out, the decision of whether or not to bomb B. - which here has to read

'Belgrade' - was not a hard one but widely supported {AT 266). Yet, Eric's being the least sympathetically portrayed character in the novel suggests that this support was uncritical in nature, choosing for example to ignore that the area had greatly suffered

191 See Habermas' Die Normalitat einer Berliner Republik. 192 Dalgaard-Nielsen summarizes this change in German foreign policy during the 1990s: "From having overwhelmingly opposed German out-of-area engagements [up to 1991], a great majority on the German left now came out in support of a German military contribution to IFOR, the NATO-led peacekeeping force established to implement the December 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement for Yugoslavia (Federal Press Agency, 1995). The following years saw the crossing of several lines that had earlier defined the limits of Germany's international military engagement. IFOR's follow-up mission, SFOR, represented the first deployment of combat troops charged with security tasks, and in October 1998 German politicians took the final step on the road that led from military abstinence to full participation in out-of-area crisis management: Approving the contribution of 14 German fighter jets to Operation Allied Force over Kosovo, a broad majority in the Bundestag endorsed the first participation ever of Bundeswehr soldiers in a combat mission - a mission that was not directly legitimized by the UN Security Council" (348). 193 Starting March 24th, 1999, German aircraft and NATO allies bombed targets in Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo to "prevent a 'humanitarian catastrophe'" (Becker 347). 106 from German occupation during World War II (Deupmann 8).194 However, reworking the past, Germany now felt that it was precisely because of its history that it "seemed predestined to put the lessons learnt from the genocidal cataclysm into practice" and that it was "particularly legitimized, indeed almost burdened to intervene" in the events on the territories of former Yugoslavia (Becker 347). "Nie wieder Auschwitz" for the first time in German post-war history now implied the opposite of "Nie wieder Krieg" (Deupmann

8, Dalgaard-Nielsen 347).195

The various ways in which the wars in former Yugoslavia have been instrumentalized by Germany for its own ends render it understandable that Abel is not allowed a happy ending. In his 1998 Sonntagsrede, Martin Walser (in)famously called for an end to the practice of stressing Germany's "Schande" and asked: "Aber in welchen

Verdacht gerat man, wenn man sagt, die Deutschen seien jetzt ein ganz normales Volk, eine ganz gewohnliche Gesellschaft?".196 However, as Mora's text implies, Walser's public and intellectual critics confused Schande with Scham.191 Whereas Walser sensibly called for an end to Schande, he never calls for an end to Scham.m While both words

194 Eric: "Streit gibt es hochstens dariiber, ob wir B. bombardieren sollten oder nicht. Jeder, der etwas auf sich halt, ist dafiir, wie steht's mit dir?' (266). 'The only matter of dispute could be whether or not we should bomb B. or not. Everyone who thinks well of himself, is in favor, what about you [Abel]?' 195 'never again Auschwitz'; 'never again war'; Fischer seems happy to point out and accept this paradox in the Newsweek interview cited above. 196 'Yet, how does one ever become suspicious if one were to suggest that the Germans now are a completely normal people, a completely ordinary society.' 197 llie most famous attack results in the prolonged exchange between Walser and Ignatz Bubis, collected as the Walser-Bubis Dabatte (Suhrkamp 1999). 198 In fact, Walser rather argues that insisting on German collective Schande effectively prevents private, inner Scham: "[W]enn mir aber jeden Tag in den Medien diese Vergangenheit vorgehalten wird, merke ich, daB sich in mir etwas gegen diese Dauerprasentation unserer Schande wehrt. Anstatt dankbar zu sein fiir die unaufhorliche Prasentation unserer Schande, fange ich an wegzuschauen." 'Yet, when the media reproaches me with this past on a day to day basis, I start noticing that something inside me rebels against this permanent presentation of our disgrace. Instead of being grateful for this never ceasing presentation, I start to look away.' 107 mean and can be translated as 'shame,' the first connotes public disgrace and is therefore merely concerned with appearances, oriented towards the outside, whereas Scham is an inner, private feeling of being ashamed. It is the latter feeling of shame from which

Abel's mushroom trip initially absolves him but which, as the novel ultimately shows, cannot or should not be left behind. As someone from former Yugoslavia as well as a

European, he cannot be allowed not to be ashamed. Therefore, the only way in which

Abel can attain inner peace is by being given the mercy of forgetting.199 But this forgetting comes at a terrible cost and is itself an act of violence. The novel's ending suggests that Abel's initial reaction to the discovery that violence remains unabashedly at the heart of Europe and in the hearts of its citizens, is actually appropriate. It is the rest of society that suffers from amnesia. Rather than moving into a post-war or post-Cold War age, Abel's self-imprisonment in the land of shame attests to Ingeborg Bachmann's insight in the poem "Alle Tage", which has given the novel its title.200 Opening with the lines "Der Krieg wird nicht mehr erklart,/ sondern fortgesetzt. Das Unerhorte/ ist alltaglich geworden" (Bachmann 27),201 Bachmann points to the way in which the violence of war permeates everyday life after WWII.202 Naming her novel after the poem,

Mora points out that despite what Western Europe may have claimed after the end of the

199 It is no coincidence that Mercedes' name, as Abel points out, means mercy or "Gnade" {AT 407). 200 According to Mora, reading this poem was indispensible for her to continue writing the novel (Albrecht 276). Like Bachmann, Mora ironically inverts the biblical phrase 'alle Tage', a message of comfort and companionship found in the gospels when Jesus tells his followers that despite his death, he will be with them "alle Tage bis an der Welt Ende" (Matthew 28.18-20). 201 'The war is no longer explained but continued. The unheard of has become an everyday occurrence.' 202 Claude Heiser points out that in this poem, Bachmann argues that mechanisms of war "werden nicht mehr als dem offenen Konflikt inharente Strukturen vorausgesetzt, sondern sind zum Bestandteil, ja zum Wesen des Alltages geworden"(l 1). Like Abel, Bachmann's antiheroes are incapable of acting, are passive and speechless and therefore wait for rather than work towards change (12). 108

Cold War, war is still present in its midst. For people from former Yugoslavia, it is no mere memory but lived experience. As its embodiment, Abel brought his war-torn home country with him to B.203 His home-town, "eine ruhige, dunkle Insel anstelle eines ehemaligen Sumpfgebiets" (24) is consequently eerily similar to his new city of B. considering that the name Berlin comes from the Slavonic word for marsh or bog.204 Like

Abel, Berlin cannot simply move past or beyond wars.205

The wars in former Yugoslavia, and particularly the fate of Sarajevo, also raise the issue of Berlin's reality and image of itself as a multicultural city. Created out of a multitude of diverse ethnicities, Tito's socialist post-WWII Yugoslavia was successfully established on "an 'open' version of Yugoslavism that would respect and promote the distinct national cultures" (Sofos 256). As such, before the wars in the 1990s, Sarajevo was seen as emblematic for the possibility of the peaceful coexistence of various ethnicities and religious affiliations. Peter Handke, for instance, celebrates and mourns

Serbia mostly as the affirmation of his idea that 'authentic' Yugoslavia was a multi­

203 This inability to escape is also invoked by the numerous instances in which Able is said to be walking in circles. His visions of the future are turning in circles (29); Konstantin, who eventually is deported 'back home', observes that "alles dreht sich zuriick in denselben Kreis"(93); upon meeting Abel again after several years, Mercedes feels that they had walked in a circle, and even though hers is different by significant nuances, she is unclear whether Abel's is (273); in the chapter entitled "Kreise", in which 'Kreise' serves as both the final word of the pervious chapter, completing the sentence "So kommt man in neue [Kreise]"(162) and as the title of the new one, Tibor's greeting "Da sind Sie ja wieder!"(163) ironically contradicts the notion of Abel ever moving into new circles; and during his tribunal, Abel is accused of being utterly boring since he always walks in a circle "immer haarscharf am Wesentlichen vorbei" (390). 204 "a quiet, dark island in place of a former marshland"; For the origin of the name Berlin, see http://www.onomastik.com/on_slawische_ortsnamen.php. 205 Mora's text thus seems to side with scholars such as Omer Bartov who caution against a renewed historical revisionism. However, one can also argue, as Daniel Becker does, that "at century's end, Germany witnessed neither memory-business as usual, with only certain well-worn faces disappearing, nor a return to patterns of denial and forgetting first developed in the immediate wake of World War II. Instead, the flurry of discursive events marked a much more profound epistemic rupture with ultimately beneficial consequences for contemporary Germany's memory culture" (338). 109 ethnic one (Deupmann 17). For Europe today, the wars in Yugoslavia thus also present the challenge of how to sustain a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. As the case of

Yugoslavia shows, the coexistence of multiple ethnicities, religions and languages in one country does not simply make it a successful multicultural society. This is particularly relevant to Berlin, which tries hard to create and maintain an image of itself as, in Mora's

Konstantin's words, the "pulsierendsten Metropole ihrer Hemisphere" (96). As events such as the "Karneval der Kulturen" show, multiculturalism is an integral part of Berlin's post-Wende metropolitan image. As one can read on the website for the Carnival of

Cultures: "Die Weltstadt Berlin ist heute ethnisch, religios und kulturell heterogen gepragt und ist nach der deutschen Vereinigung in den Mittelpunkt des internationalen

Interesses geriickt, auch als Symbol fur den Weg zu einem vereinten Europa."

Such media slogans are repeated by Konstantin, the novel's most unreliable character, who, alluding to the famous 'Berliner Luft' tells Abel that B. is a "fabelhafte

Stadt. [...] Sie tragt die meisten Ziige der weiBen Welt, Ost-West-Siid-Nord, dazu eine

Prise Asien und sogar eine wenig Afrika. Konfessionen! Nationalitaten! Oh, konnte man doch das Fenster offnen und das beriihmte Air dieser Stadt auf der Haut spiiren" (96).207

Unaware of the contradiction, Konstantin's sentence continues detailing the plight of those that come to the city, which eventually also is the place in which he will be denied citizenship via legal channels, and from which he is deported for trying to obtain forged papers. Konstantin and Kinga, a former teacher who deprived of her mother tongue is

206http://www.karneval-berlin.de/de/geschichte.7.html 207 'fabulous city [...] combines the features of the white world, East-West-South-North, with a pinch of Asia and even Africa. Religions! Nationalities! If only we could open the window and feel the famous air of this city on our skin.' 110 reduced to being a "Ackergaul und Sexualobjekt" (146),208 are potent reminders that the mere presence of multiple races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions does not render

Berlin a multicultural global city overnight. It also undermines any grand image that living in and amongst other cultures is one happy carnival. Neither 10 nor 50 languages can make anyone or anything into something. Just like Abel, Berlin cannot de-localize itself, transcend its history. Rather, Konstantin is right on one point: Berlin is indeed a

'pulsating' city and its body, the weight of which is constituted by its history and present, is what keeps it alive. As a living and lived-in city, Berlin is neither post-war nor post- national.

208 'farm horse and sexual object' Ill

CHAPTER V. Ozdamar's Seltsame Sterne'. Ideological and Performative Berlins

You said: 'I'll go to another land, I'll go to another sea. Another city will be found, a better one than this. My every effort is doomed by destiny and my heart—like a dead man—lies buried.' (Cavafy 29)

Turning a little bit away from Tawada's concerns with Japanese Berlin, §enocak's

Turkish Berlin, and Mora's Balkan Berlin, the following two chapters pay more attention to Berlin-Berlin. That is, they to a large part focus on Berlin's divided past. In this chapter I will outline how Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's novels Die Briicke vom Goldenen

Horn and Seltsame Sterne starren zurErde, both set in the late 1960s and 1970s, explore the meaning East Berlin retains for Berlin today. Her novels are marked by a distanced point of view that nevertheless facilitates rather than prevents the narrator's arrival in

Berlin. As I will argue, the narrator learns to distance herself after becoming disillusioned with the simultaneously divisive and homogenizing effects of an ideologically informed language and life-style. To counteract the latter, she turns to an aesthetics informed by

Brechtean theatre. I argue that this aesthetics is operative in her deliberate self- positioning at a distance from and non-identification with any alterity, be the latter of an ethnic, political, temporal, or spatial kind. It is paradoxically this keeping at a distance from Berlin that allows her to stay in Berlin. 112

Ideological Idiom in Berlin and Istanbul

Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's three novels Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, hat zwei Tiiren, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus (1992),209 Die Briicke vom

Goldenen Horn (1998), and Selfsame Sterne starren zur Erde (2003) were republished as a trilogy titled Sonne aufhalbem Weg: Die Berlin-Istanbul-Trilogie in 2006, The trilogy fictionalizes the author's biography, thus tracing the life of a female first-person narrator who is born in Anatolia, grows up all over Turkey, goes to the divided Berlin as a guest worker, returns to Istanbul to attend acting school, and comes back in 1976 to live in

West Berlin and work at the East Berlin Volksbiihne under one of Brecht's students,

Benno Besson. Like her narrator, Ozdamar eventually leaves Germany for Paris.210

Naming the collection the Berlin-Istanbul trilogy fittingly draws attention to the city as being one of the work's overarching themes. A quest started in Die Briicke, it is particularly in Selfsame Sterne that Ozdamar's narrator hopes to find in Berlin, to borrow

Cavafy's words, another city, "a better one" than the Istanbul of the 60s and 70s. Thus, she hopes to refute her ex-husband, who cites the second verse of Cavafy's poem "The

City," expecting that she will ultimately fail to arrive anywhere new: "Du wirst keine neuen Lander entdecken, keine anderen Meere./ Die Stadt wird dirfolgen. Du wirst

209 Life Is a Caravanserai: Has Two Doors I Came in One / Went Out the Other (2000); The Bridge of the Golden Horn (2007); henceforth cited in the text as Die Briicke; Strange stars stare at the earth, not yet translated; henceforth cited in the text as Seltsame Sterne or SS in parenthesis; Midway sun: the Berlin-Istanbul trilogy. 210 Whereas the trilogy ends at this point, the author herself has subsequently returned to Germany, where she currently lives and works in Berlin as a successful theatre and film actor, playwright and author of short-stories and novels (Seyhan, "From Istanbul" 169). 113 durch dieselben Strafien/ Streifen, in denselben Viertelrt alt werderi" (SS 56, italics in 911 original).

Initially, the narrator indeed seems unable to simply escape Istanbul, which also means that she does not really arrive in Berlin. In an insightful study of Die Briicke and

Seltsame Sterne, Ottmar Ette counts Ozdamar's works as being part of a "Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz" (169).212 Neither here nor there but rather connecting Berlin and

Istanbul by constantly weaving back and forth between them, Ette sees her works as marked by "Dislokation und Heterotopic als standiges Springen zwischen den Orten"

(180).213 While I ultimately disagree with Ette's assessment, it is indeed the case that

Istanbul and the narrator's memories of life in Turkey continually invade Berlin's spaces.

Istanbul establishes an at times even somatic presence in Berlin. For instance, the smell of the streets in East Berlin recalls the smells of her grandmother's heating the stove in

Istanbul, and the car exhausts smell the same in the one place as they do in the other (SS

81). Also, observations such as those of the slow concentrated movement of the actors at the Volksbtihne recall her grandmother's slow movements and elicit a short panoramic description of her Turkish flat and the morning sea (82). Similarly, considering the scarcity of stores in East Berlin conjures up the image of residents of Istanbul traversing the city in zigzag movements to navigate an overwhelming abundance of stores (165).

Instances of a visual, auditory, or olfactory sensation prompting vivid memories of

Istanbul are so frequent that the narrator at one point exclaims: "Die bucklige Hure, die das Feuer fachelte, das krumme Holzhaus, der Balkon, bedeckt mit Maulbeeren, Bursa,

211 "Any new lands you will not find; you'll find no other seas./ The city will be following you. In the same streets/ you'll wander. And in the same neighbourhoods you'll age" (Cavafy 29). 212 'literature without fixed abode' 213 'dislocation and heterogeneity as an incessant jumping between places' Istanbul, lasst mich in Ruhe in Berlin!" (123).214 Considering the continued blending of

Istanbul and Berlin, Ette's assessment of her texts as remaining in a space between the two cities seems warranted. Almust Hille, looking at Die Briicke and Selfsame Sterne also maintains that the narrator never arrives in Berlin. She argues that the first-person narrator is a mere observer and remains at a distance from Berlin, which appears as an unreal scenery to her (Hille 110). From her bird's-eye perspective and with her starry look, the narrator seems to render the border-crossing between East and West "Alltag, allerdings nicht zu einem Alltag 'zwischen den Kulturen,' sondern 'iiber' ihnen" (109-

110).215

In contrast to Ette and Hille, I align myself, albeit for different reasons, with those

who argue that the narrator does make herself at home in Berlin. For instance, Silke

Schade, drawing on Edward Soja's thirdspace as lived space, convincingly argues that the narrator in Die Briicke, "[b]y rooting herself firmly in the present, by living space instead of just observing it, and by employing agency and creativity in her interactions with new spaces ..., begins to build a strong sense of place, and, in turn, a sense of home for herself in the city of Berlin" (23).216 Leaning on Julia Hell's observations of the mobilization of the sick and sexualized fascist body versus the nonsexual pure socialist body, Sonja

Klocke's dissertation also carves Seltsame Sterne a place in "German, and more specifically East German tradition" (253). As I will argue in this chapter, while a distanced point of view indeed marks both novels, it facilitates rather than prevents the

214 'The hunchbacked whore who fans the fire, the crooked wooden house, the balcony covered with mulberries, Bursa, Istanbul, leave me in peace in Berlin!' 215 'an everyday life, but not to an everyday life "between cultures," but 'above' them.' 216 In Postmetropolis, Edward Soja summarizes his concept of thirdspace as a perspective from which "the spatial specificity of urbanism is investigated as fully lived space, a simultaneously real-and-imagined, actual-and-virtual, locus of structured individual and collective experience and agency" (11). For an elaborate account of his concept, see Thirdspace. 115 narrator's arrival in Berlin. After her narrator becomes disillusioned with the simultaneously divisive and homogenizing effects of ideologically informed language and life-style, she turns to an aesthetics informed by Brechtean theater. This aesthetics is one of deliberate distance and non-identification with alterity, be the latter of an ethnic, political, temporal, or spatial kind. Berlin thus remains at a distance on account of the narrator's respect for alterity.

In Seltsame Sterne the narrator's main stated reason for having left Turkey is the state of the Turkish language, which for her has become inextricably linked to and been tainted by the violent suppression of the student revolution. All she and her friends in

Istanbul utter in Turkish are "nur solche Satze wie: Sie werden sie aufhangen" (23) and the news she receives from Istanbul consists effectually of "ein einziges Wort: Mord"

(101).217 The notion that language has become ill continues an important theme started, albeit in a slightly different context, in Die Briicke. Her loss of faith in Turkish is occasioned by her disillusionment with the international socialist student movement and results in the narrator's eventual realization of both the dangers and possibilities emerging from the gap between signifier and signified characteristic of language itself. In the second part of Die Briicke vom Goldenen Horn the narrator depicts her involvement in the socialist student movement in Istanbul, to which she has returned from Berlin after the police shot Benno Ohnesorg on June 2nd, an event which led to the final politicization and eventual militarization of what became known as Bewegung 2. Juni.

Initially, Ozdamar's narrator wholly identifies herself with the socialist student movement in both Berlin and Istanbul. She repeats their ideological slogans and is eager

217 'Only sentences like: They will hang them.'; 'a single word: murder'; all translations from Seltsame Sterne are mine. 116 to become a "bewuBtes Madchen" (conscious girl) to please her boyfriend and socialist student leader Kerim (Briicke 252).218 Thus, she initially seems to be no different from members of the student movements, but she eventually becomes able to critique them.

While still in Berlin, she describes the students as chickens and soon discovers "tiirkische

Hiihner, die auf den StraBen neben den deutschen Huhnern mitliefen und die gleiche

Huhnersprache sprachen" (Briicke 158-59).219 The students are united by a common vocabulary, forming a flock of domesticated poultry.220 Even though ideologically informed language unites across national language barriers, Ozdamar emphasizes that it is equally capable of dividing, revealed when Istanbul's various political groups soon become unable to communicate with each other. At the newspaper stands, leftist, fascist and religious newspapers hang next to each other and, even though all are written in

Turkish, they are like "drei Fremdsprachen" whose speakers eventually fight each other in the streets (296).221 More significantly, the leftist party itself ultimately splits into smaller groups and "ihre Sprache zerfiel in neue Sprachen" (296).222 Divisions between the various ideologies separating political factions, generations (160) and eventually all of Istanbul seem too large to be crossed. Thus, while the narrator is able to translate between German and Turkish in her role as translator in a German factory workers'

218 While "bewuBt" (to be conscious/aware of something) is used several times, the term remains empty since neither Kerim nor the narrator ever define or explain what someone who is 'bewuBt' does or is. In a sense, Kerim asks the narrator to become as empty as the term, and thus to be a mere vessel for his intellectual and sexual contents. 219 "Turkish chickens, who walked with the German chickens on the streets and spoke the same chicken language" (Bridge 119). Unless otherwise noted, the translations from Die Briicke are taken from the translation by Martain Chalmers. 220 Describing a group of young girls who talk a lot about nothing, Germans say: 'Die gackern wie die Hiihner' (They cackle like hens). 221 "three foreign languages" (Bridge 230). 222 "their language divided into new languages" (Bridge 231). 117 residence, translation is impossible between mutually incomprehensible, ideologically determined codes.

To a large extent, this impossibility is due to the hermeneutic impulse that

Ozdamar satirically reveals to be inherent in the socialist intellectual movement.

Observing Turkish leftist students, the narrator remarks that they only care about words:

"Alle Studenten hatten groBe Ohren, weil sie jedes Wort horten und sofort, wie die

Chirurgen, die Worter sezierten" (160).223 Ozdamar's use of knife and scissor imagery in her parody of the overdetermined jargon of various political movements points toward the violent effects of cutting and dissecting language. With a whimsical playfulness typical of her writing, Ozdamar here appropriates a line from Rotkappchen (Red Riding

Hood), famous in Germany, where the wolf when asked "[w]as hast du fur groBe

Ohren?" receives the answer "DaB ich dich besser horen kann" (Grimm 117). Ozdamar implies that there is ultimately little difference between groups such as the Turkish extremist fascist and nationalist not incidentally called Grauen Wolfe (grey wolves), who sexually assault a group of leftist female students for being communists (Mani,

Cosmopolitical 78-95, Briicke 255-6), and the increasingly militant factions of the socialist movement. At the restaurant Kapitan, the meeting point of the socialist students, the narrator similarly observes that suddenly "saBen zwanzig groBe Scheren am Tisch, die sich nach links und rechts drehten" (231).224 The students' mincing of words, obsessive redefinition, and dialectical re-interpretation of concepts reduce politics to an

223 "All the students had big ears, because they heard every word and, like surgeons, immediately dissected them" (Bridge 120). 224 "twenty big pairs of scissors were sitting at the table, turning to left and right" (Bridge 179). 118

•yy< empty hermeneutical exercise. Focused on slogans and specific jargon, the various groups sever themselves both from society and from each other.

This theme is continued in Selfsame Sterne, where the latter scene is mirrored by the behavior of her West-Berlin friends. After the narrator returns to Berlin, she lives in a

West-Berlin Wohngemeinschaft (shared student apartment), composed of students from the BRD who unsuccessfully and at times half-heartedly attempt to escape their parents' fascist past. During a conversation, the word 'depressing' semi-automatically prompts a discussion, as if the students were given a cue:

Das Wort deprimierend wirkte so, als hatte jemand in einem dunklen Saal

die Lichter angemacht. Plotzlich saBen sie alle da wie in einem Seminar

bei Sokrates: halbnackt, einige hatten Handtiicher iiber die Schultern

gelegt wie eine Toga.... Susanne machte vier Kerzen an, und die sieben

Seminaristen sprachen iiber das Wort deprimierend. (51 )226

This recalls another scene in Die Briicke in which art students calling themselves surrealists wear their bed sheets like Romans and sit on the floor discussing philosophical concepts. Their self-importance is undermined when one of the students' mother says:

"Kinder, ich weiB, daB ihr spielt, aber konnt ihr nicht meine Wasche in Ruhe lassen?"

(198).227 The students in the Wohngemeinschaft are equally brought back to reality when they realize to their astonishment and delight that the narrator had washed their large

225 Monika Shafi also points out that, even though "the nairator embraces leftist ideas and goals, she is also critical of these slogans and the students' often naive (linguistic) radicalism" ("Joint Venture" 204). 226 'The word depressing had the same effect as if someone had switched on the lights in a dark hall. Suddenly, all of them sat there as if in a seminar with Socrates: half-naked, some had thrown towels over their shoulders like togas.... Susanne lit four candles, and the seven seminar participants spoke about the word depressing.' 227 "Children, I know you're playing, but couldn't you leave my bedlinen alone?" (Bridge 151) 119 piles of dishes while they were discussing (SS 52). In the end, she is the only one actually achieving anything. It becomes clear that the Wohngemeinschaft members, while harmless, are as politically ineffective as the militant student movements in Istanbul, who eventually fight each other rather than the political regime they had set out to change.

The narrator's disillusionment with the socialist idiom in Die Briicke becomes complete after the failure of the attempted student revolution in Turkey. After its leaders have been executed by the military dictatorship, the narrator 's boyfriend and former role- model Kerim abandons his faith in socialism and tells the narrator : "Sprich nicht diese

Slogan-Sprache. Zieh den griinen Militarparka aus. Zieh dich an wie eine Frau" {Briicke

327).228 Initially unable simply to change uniforms and thus to acknowledge the artificiality of the movement, as well as unwilling to adopt the new restricting role of

"woman," the narrator is thrown into a crisis of language: "Mein Mund bekam eine

Allergie, er lieB sich wie eine Apfelsine schalen. Ich konnte nicht mehr reden, jedes Wort tat meinem Mund weh. Mein Vater gab mir mit einem Loffel Suppe in den Mund und sagte: 'Das ist fur Marx. Das ist fur Che Guevara. Das ist fur Engels.' Ich lachte, und das tat meinem Mund noch mehr weh" (327).229 As the narrator in Selfsame Sterne points out and Ozdamar herself states in an interview, she could no longer talk or write in Turkish after the military coup of 1971, since the words had become sick because of censorship and secrecy (Shafi, "Joint Venture" 202). Instead of starting to speak another language like Kerim, the narrator in Die Briicke is unable to speak, and her father's well-

228 "Don't talk this slogan-language. Take off your green military parka. Dress like a woman" (Bridge 254). 229 "My mouth got an allergy, it could be peeled like an orange. I couldn't talk anymore, every word hurt my mouth. My father put syrup into my mouth and said: 'This is for Marx. This is for Che Guevara. This is for Engels.' I laughed, and that hurt my mouth even more" (Bridge 254). 120 intentioned attempt to repeat the slogans in her stead merely increases the pain.230 She loses faith in the words and slogans of the socialist movement and for the first time questions the underlying ideology itself.231 Thus, she discovers that doves had shat on all of her hidden socialist books, covering Karl Marx's eyes on a photograph (Briicke

328).232 Like its blinded ideologue, the socialist movement was not able to foresee the human cost and eventual ineffectiveness of its theorizing, which the narrator realizes upon hearing the silent lament of the mothers on the bridge of the Golden Horn who mourn their imprisoned, tortured and executed children (325). Prompted by her realization, the narrator decides to return to Berlin and join the theater (329), where

Selfsame Sterne picks up the narrative thread.

Uniforms and Brechtean Costume

At the end of Die Briicke the narrator gathers a volume of Brecht poems, which consolidates her desire to return to Berlin to work at the Volksbiihne under the Brecht student Benno Besson. Initially, both acting and being part of an ideological group seem to consist of similar techniques such as memorizing, repeating, putting on costumes, and carrying props. However, as I will show, the members of the socialist student movements

230 "Kerim sagte zu mir: 'Es ist Zeit, die biirgerliche Kultur zu sammeln und neue Biicher zu lesen und andere Musik zu horen.' Wir saBen am gleichen Tisch, sahen die Jasminblatter, die vom gleichen Baum fielen, aber er hatte angefangen, eine andere Sprache zu sprechen als ich" (Briicke 327). "Kerim said to me: 'It is time to gather up bourgeois culture and to read new books and to listen to different music.' We sat at the same table, saw the jasmine leaves falling from the same tree, but he had begun to speak a different language from me" (Bridge 254). 231 Azade Seyhan has come to the same conclusion, observing that the narrator realizes "the paralysis of the naive idealism of student movements that could never be translated into effective social intervention and action, as they were so woefully trapped in hermetic cycles of endless analysis" (Seyhan, "From Istanbul" 165). 232 "Karl Marx hatte kein Auge mehr" (Briicke 328); "Karl Marx didn't have an eye any more" (Bridge 255). 121 actually identify with their ideology, eventually taking it so seriously that their costumes

become uniforms. The narrator's use of theatrical tools and methods, on the other hand,

aims at preventing allegiance to unquestioned and unquestionable ideologies. Thus, she learns to perform like a Brechtean actor, who keeps a distance from her assigned roles

and works in settings reduced to minimal, suggestive props. As Brecht argues, this is

necessary: if the setting and characters "look real we are allowed not to think at all; in

particular we are allowed not to ask 'Could things have been otherwise?'" (Brecht,

Brecht 43). Ozdamar therefore champions a Brechtean version of acting, marked by the alienation effect, "which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar" (192),233 because this defamiliarization is essential in order to provoke critical thought and thus to effect a learning process that can translate into action.

The members of the socialist student movement are unable to maintain a critical distance between themselves and their character and thus put on uniforms, change their language and cease questioning their ideology and idiolect. Therefore, the narrator initially rejects theatrical elements such as memorized lines, costumes, and props. In Die

Briicke, the narrator identifies a cigarette as the "wichtigste Requisit eines Sozialisten"

(Brticke 241),234 playing on the double meaning of the German word denoting a necessity as well as theatrical prop. Her observation of the theatricality of the socialist student movement becomes an important reflection of her growing awareness of its faults. Thus, the movement's quest to fix and exhaust the meaning of words is consistent with their need to affirm a group identity distinct from that of other groups. When a new leftist

233 In her 2007 article, Patricia Anne Simpson also observes that "Ozdamar cites the privileged place of Brechtian theater and politics in the cultural life of the left in the Turkey of the 1960s and 70s, of both Germanys in the 1970s and 80s, and in her own life as a traveler whose path to a German, leftist geography is lit by the practice of epic theater" ("Brechtian" 389). 234 "the most important prop of a socialist" (Bridge 171). 122 group splinters from the Workers' Party, its members for example dressed up or

"kostumierten sich" (296). Also, leftist students in Berlin are identifiable by their clothing and untidy appearance as if they were wearing costumes (155), and when the narrator is asked her opinion at the Kapitan, she feels like she has forgotten to memorize lines for a play (233). Similarly, the West Berlin Wohngemeinschaft members enforce

"feministische Kontrolle. Nagellack ist nicht erwiinscht" (SS 48).235 Merely reversing the patriarchal control desired by Kerim, who expected the narrator to become "bewuBter" - which coincidentally entailed becoming better in bed - the Wohngemeinschaft women expect men to become "bewuBter" and forbid the wearing of nail polish as an outer marker of their convictions (SS 54).236 By means of clothing and repeating memorized slogans, the socialist and feminist movements' members uniform themselves and their thought, becoming part of an undifferentiated and de-individualized mass. Since they seem to be incapable of realizing that they are merely wearing a costume, they wholly identify and are identified with a political ideology. Their resulting de-individuation has violent consequences in the case of the socialist student movement. For instance, the narrator describes the death of Benno Ohnesorg by invoking the chicken metaphor, commenting: "Die Polizei hatte ein Huhn erschossen, aber es lag ein Mensch da"

(170).237 As Venkat Mani points out, the latter sentence echoes Max Frisch's well known

1965 comment on the recruitment of guest-workers in Germany: "Man hat Arbeitskrafte gerufen, und Menschen sind gekommen" (Cosmopolitical 84).238 People are thus reduced

235 'feminist control. Nail polish is undesired.' 236 A credible critique of the Wohngemeinschaft is also voiced by the narrator's Jewish-Swiss friend Joseph, who considers them lumpenproletariat incapable of or unwilling to admit that books are also a luxury (76). 237 'The police had shot a chicken, but a human being was lying there.' 238 'They called for laborers and people came.' 123 to their economic function, in this case to being a guest worker, allowed the German government to ignore the presence of human beings from other countries for decades.

Wholly identifying with or being assigned roles such as leftist students, communists, or guest-workers, people are easily ignored as individual human beings, instead becoming part of and treating others as an undifferentiated mass of cackling chickens.

However, this rejection of socialist idiom, costume, and props does not extend to the use of theatricality and performance as such. In Selfsame Sterne the cigarette is reevaluated. After the narrator's first visit to East Berlin, she is euphoric at having been offered an internship at the East Berlin theater, the Volksbuhne, by Benno Besson. Thus, she dreams of flying over East Berlin with a smoking girl and her dog she had spotted in a bar. In her vision, they are all smoking, including the dog (35). The first East Berlin person she meets, a gay man who offers her to spend the night at his place, is also introduced as a smoker whom she asks for a light, and the two bond over his matchbox

(35). The young man's brand of cigarillos is explicitly named as Sprachlos (37), which not only comments on the narrator's loss or rejection of Turkish, but more importantly parallels the emphasis given to other cigarette brands. Thus, the narrator admits that she smokes Cabinet cigarettes despite the headache they give her, simply because many actors at the Volksbuhne also smoke them (20). Similarly, upon a first meeting, the text implies that is it only after Benno Besson looks at her holding her blue Gauloises cigarette packet, that he accepts her as an intern (33-34), apparently because he himself also smokes Gauloises without filter (40).239 Meeting another prominent member shortly afterwards, she feels as if he is eyeing her suspiciously and therefore offers him a

239 Polanski's 1976 The Tenant (Le locataire) repeatedly draws attention to Gauloises, which could be considered a national and iconic brand for French intellectuals and artists at the time. 124 cigarillo. His recognition of Sprachlos convinces him of whatever he was looking for and he leaves (39). While it is most likely only the narrator's perception that her acceptance in East Berlin and at the Volksbiihne is tied to cigarettes and cigarillos, they once more figure as an important prop signaling belonging. However, this time, it signals belonging to individuals rather than a group. The fat girl and gay man, for instance, are marked as outsiders. In addition, cigarettes are a sign of belonging to the Volksbiihne, in the

Brechtean context of which lines, costumes, and props take on an entirely different significance as part of Ozdamar's Brechtean aesthetics.

This aesthetics implies that one's own ideological discourse is but one amongst many, since putting on a costume as a Brechtean actor actually prevents one from uniforming oneself. Due to the critical distance between actor and character, complete identification is prevented and one is forced to ask if things ought to be otherwise. This kind of performance is celebrated early on in Die Brticke when the women in the guest- workers' residences in Berlin come to accept their differences:

Alle Frauen machten die Gesichtsausdrucke, die Handbewegungen und

die Dialekte der anderen nach, man machte sich dariiber lustig, wie sie

liefen, wie sie afien, und so fingen die Frauen irgendwann an, sich wieder

ahnlich zu sehen. Ihre Gesichter und Korper und Miinder nahmen die

Gesichter, Korper, und Dialekte der anderen in sich auf, gewohnten sich

an sie. (43)240

240 "All the women mimicked the expressions, the gestures and the dialects of the others, they made fun of the way they walked, the way they ate, and so at some point the women began to look like one another again. Their faces and bodies and mouths absorbed the faces and bodies and dialects of the others, became accustomed to them" (Bridge 28). 125

Even though the women do not speak the same idiolects, their meaningless imitation effectively allows them to co-exist among and next to each other. They temporarily take the others in, try on their costumes and thus no longer fear their differences from one another. Similarly, while the narrator finds it very difficult to leave the student movement, since its codes and uniforms demand complete assimilation, she remarks that the Turkish workers' association was a lot easier to leave because the workers' faces were "wie unterschiedliche Masken, man konnte diese Masken lieben, iiber sie lachen, weinen und sie wieder verlassen. Sie konnten sich selber iiber ihre Masken lustig machen" (85-6).241 Not taking themselves and their differences too seriously, the members of the Arbeiterverein do not assume some shared identity in the way in which the socialist students do. Therefore, the narrator can easily assume and shed her affiliation with the workers' club as if it were a mask.

A Place Away

This notion of distanced performance allows one better to understand two key scenes in

Die Briicke, which illustrate Ozdamar's non-identificatory approach to alterity.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to two instances in Die Briicke that involve a curious doubling of the narrator and constitute the only moments in the novel that employ third-person narration.242 Reading a novel about female self-sacrifice combined with the

241 "like different masks, one could love these masks, laugh about them, cry and leave them again. They themselves could make fun of their masks" (Bridge 61). 242 Elizabeth Boa and Tom Cheesman at least draw attention to the instances of doubling during the love affair. Boa calls the narrator's experience "an out-of-body self division reminiscent of stories in A Thousand and One Nights" (538) and Cheesman observes that "[s]trikingly, throughout the erotic passage where the protagonist loses her virginity (or thinks she does), she is divided from herself," drawing attention to "a multiplication and unmooring of selves" (Novels 72). 126 memory of the freedom she felt in Berlin and her ambition to become an actress, the pregnant narrator decides neither to marry nor to have a child while between Asia and

Europe:

Das Schiff befand sich gerade in der Mitte zwischen dem asiatischen und

europaischen Istanbul. Die Schauspielerin kam aus meinem Korper

heraus, vor sich her schob sie einen Mann und ein Kind und warf sie vom

Schiff ins Marmara-Meer. Dann kam sie zuriick und ging wieder in mich

hinein. (Briicke 194)243

Significantly, it is the actress within the narrator who makes the important decision not to marry and to terminate her pregnancy. In order to pursue her dream of the theatre, her potential future self (that is, the actress) rejects her alternative self as wife and mother.

Realizing that she is free to choose the role she wants to adopt and thus carries full responsibility for her actions, she liberates herself from the unwanted pregnancy in the space opening up on the Sea where nothing is fixed and determined and everything is fluid and changeable.

While the motif of doubling is slightly different during the narrator's love affair with the Spanish Jordi in Paris, her distance from herself also functions to prevent identification. Throughout her time together with Jordi, the narrator is doubled, othered within her self, and able to look at herself and her actions critically. She talks about herself in the third person, describing the actions of "ein zweites Ich" (Briicke 130),244 and at times also assigns Jordi a double. Whether it is in the restaurant, during their trip to

243 "The ship was just in the middle between Asian and European Istanbul. The actress came out of my body, she pushed a man and a child in front of her and threw them from the ship into the Sea of Marmara. The she came back and entered me again" (Bridge 147). 244 "a second self' (Bridge 96) 127

Versailles, or while sleeping with each other, the narrator is two people: one watching the actions of the other, describing them from a distance. Considering that the narrator and

Jordi are scarcely able to communicate, their only common language being broken

English, it becomes apparent that this doubling prevents both the characters and the reader from identifying any Utopian communion or communication in love. As Cheesman points out: "[T]he couple certainly does not appear as a harmonious symbolic whole"

(Novels 72). Rather, the distance that allows the narrator freely to choose her future as an actress now aids her in experiencing an interpersonal relationship that forgoes consumption and possession. The doubling can indeed be read as a fictional embodiment of Luce Irigaray's famous "i love to you," which denotes an ethical love towards an irreducible other, the respect for whom is captured in the distance of the "to." Irigaray envisions an encounter characterized "by the need for the recognition of another who will never be mine"; an approach to alterity that prevents "reducing the other to an item of property" (11). This approach to the designated Other is close to Emmanuel Levinas' ethics, which aims at preventing the erasure of difference implicit in identificatory approaches to alterity. Like Irigaray, Levinas emphasizes that there is an irreducible otherness that resists being understood, grasped and comprehended by the "knowing I," and thus cannot be assimilated as part of the same, that "melting pot" that subsumes "the alterity of all that is Other" (11). Both Levinas and Irigaray advocate approaching the

Other by acknowledging and respecting his or her irreducible difference instead of desiring to fully identify with him or her, be it out of love or the desire to understand.245

Ozdamar's protagonist's Brechtean-informed performance, which leaves room between

245 There is a strong connection between Levinas and Irigaray's philosophies, convincingly argued by Kate Ince. 128

Self and ideology and Self and Other achieves a similar result. It opens up a space, to

borrow Irigaray's words, "in which the subject is no longer one, solipsistic, egocentric

and potentially imperialistic, but which rather respects differences" (47).

Ozdamar's willingness to leave alterity unassimilated marks the narrative

approach in all part of her Berlin-Istanbul trilogy. All three works have autobiographical

and fictional components, a mixture of genres that allows Ozdamar to distance her work

from the earlier confessional literature such as Gastarbeiterliteratur and

Betrojfenheitsliteratur. As discussed in the introduction, these mostly first-person

autobiographical narratives have often been reduced to being authentic retellings of the

experience of downtrodden 'Alis' and have incurred all the pitfalls associated with claims

of authenticity and the contested figure of the native informant. Instead, Ozdamar

eschews unquestionable claims to representational status and foregrounds the fictionality

inherent in all acts of narrating both self and other. The main significance of the

relationship between fiction and autobiographical detail in her work, however, lies in

preventing such identificatory practices as critiqued above. This becomes most apparent

in Seltsame Sterne, a text composed of different kinds of litterature intime, in this case, diary entries and autobiography. According to Lejeune's classic definition, in litterature intime, the "author (whose name designates a real person)" and the narrator, as well as the narrator and the protagonist, "are identical" (193). Whereas such equivalence is not established in the first two works of the trilogy, where the narrator remains unnamed, things become more complicated in Seltsame Sterne. There, the narrator and protagonist is named twice as Emine (183, 240), thus suggesting equivalence between author, protagonist, and narrator not only on the level of resemblance or biographical detail but 129 actually on the level of identity. That is, "the author on the level of the speech act" states equivalence between herself and the narrating text-internal I (Lejeune 201). Reading

Karawanserei, Ottmar Ette also draws on Lejeune, thus calling the work an:

Autobiographic ohne autobiographischen Pakt.... Die Gleichsetzung

dieses textinternen Ich mit der realen, textexternen Autorin ware ein

ebenso groBes Missverstandnis dieses poetischen Textes wie eine

Leugnung der vielfaltigen Beziehungen und Verkniipfungen zwischen

beiden Frauen und Lebensreisen. (175)246

However, Ette puts too much emphasis on resemblance and thus mistakenly calls

Karawanserei an autobiography. In fact, it is only identity that creates the autobiographical contract, not resemblance. As Lejeune emphasizes, the "reader can quibble about how much resemblance there is between the protagonist and the author, but not about whether there is 'identity'" (202). If identity is lacking, as it is in

Karawanserei, the lack or presence of resemblance becomes irrelevant since we are then dealing with autobiographical fiction rather than autobiography (203). Because the narrator and protagonist is named as the author in Selfsame Sterne, this work's claim to autobiography and thus to a referential contract—or "claim to convey information about a

'reality' which is external to the text" (211)—is actually substantiated. Thus, it is only in this text that matters of the autobiographical and referential contracts become problematic. Put differently, Ette's observation about an autobiography without the autobiographical contract, while misplaced for Karawanserei, is in fact quite fitting for the way in which Ozdamar tackles issues of identity and referentiality in Seltsame Sterne.

246 'autobiography without autobiographical contract.... Equating this text-internal I with the real, text-external author would be just as much of a misunderstanding of this poetical text as it would be to deny the manifold relations and entanglements between both women and life journeys.' 130

Matters of autobiography and authenticity are tied to the Brechtean aesthetic that, as I have argued above, marks Selfsame Sterne. Most obviously, the importance of theater in this text is stressed by the inclusion of facsimiles of the author's theater sketches for the performance of Heiner Muller's Die Bauern and Goethe's Burgergeneral and the fact that the narrator works at the Volksbiihne. Once more, the narrator also navigates her life by performing her roles, just as she did in Die Briicke. For instance, her friend Joseph advises her simply to imagine that the Wohngemeinschaft is a theater stage in order to cope with the feminist demands of its residents (SS 48). That this performance is once more Brechtean in the above outlined sense becomes apparent in her admiration of Benno

Besson, whom she cites early on in Selfsame Sterne on the importance of a critical audience whose members know "dass es so nicht geht, aber dass es andere Wege gibt"

(44).247 It seems therefore warranted to claim that the disturbances of the autobiographical and referential contract in Selfsame Sterne are the result of Ozdamar's

Brechtean aesthetic. Considering and comparing Ozdamar's entire body of work leads one to question the validity of this contract. For instance, in Selfsame Sterne her roommate Katrin in East Berlin is a student who studies Italian in the morning in the kitchen knowing full well that she may never see Italy (SS 80). In the narrative "Mein

Berlin," the first-person narrator is also identified as the author by being called Sevgi, the author's middle name (58),248 but here, it is her roommate, an unnamed actress, who sits

247 'that it cannot continue like this, but that there are other ways'; Calling Besson a Brecht student is of course debatable. He never merely copied or followed Brecht. As the narrator emphasizes, citing from a book about Besson, "fur Besson war der Begriff des 'Brechtschiilers' nie mit den Begriffen 'sklavische Nachahmung' und 'bedingunslose' Apologie verbunden" (30). In the same way, what I call Ozdamar's Brechtean aesthetic is an approach merely informed by, not following, Brecht. 248 Again, Ozdamar plays with fiction and narrative, subtitling the in part fictional, in part autobiographical pieces in Der Hof im Spiegel "Erzahlungen." 131 in the kitchen each morning studying Spanish, not knowing if she will ever see Spain

(59). Similarly, in "Mein Berlin," the narrator states that she lives with Kati and Theo in

West Berlin and it is them whom she calls from East Berlin to ask if it is also snowing in

West Berlin (60). In Seltsame Sterne, on the other hand, the narrator claims that she first lives with Hanna and Dirk and then in the Wohngemeinschaft, which she calls from East

Berlin to ask if it is also raining in West Berlin (80). As a final example, in Seltsame

Sterne, her visa for East Berlin is for six months (165) while in "Mein Berlin", it is said to be for 3 months (58). Looking at similar work-immanent cross-references, Liesbeth

Minnaard argues that Ozdamar's "quasi-autobiographical" body of work prevents any

"'simple stories of identity"(72), calling the Self presented in the writing "clearly a fictional construction: in a playful way this Self is 'almost-Sevgi'—invented, unfathomable, elusive"(72). While I agree with Minnaard that Ozdamar undermines the referential contract in order to destabilize any notions of a fixed and stable identity, calling the resulting Self 'almost-Sevgi' misses the point that there is no Sevgi in the first place, at least not one that can be narrated by Sevgi herself. That is, just as the narrator in

Die Brticke is doubled, so is the author herself doubled in the body of her work to suggest that there never can be an identity between author and protagonist/narrator. Keeping with her Brechtean aesthetics, Ozdamar herself continually draws attention to the performative nature of her own past and present identity, effectively destabilizing any referential contract. 132

Distanced Arrival

This contract is also disturbed by means of the narrator's descriptions of 1970s Berlin as slightly unreal. During her first night in East Berlin, the narrator for instance observes a worm crawling out of a walnut, commenting that this worm seems as unreal to her as the people around her (SS 37). Similarly, a Trabant and German Democratic Republic manufactured matchbox seem unreal to her, as if they were toys, made by and for children (19, 35). As if she were one of the stars of the book's title looking down, the people of East Berlin seem very small to the narrator, as if they were mere cutouts pasted onto the Karl-Marx-Allee in a collage (81).249 Thus, when the narrator crosses the border to West Berlin after her visa expires, she observes: "Sechs Monate habe ich in Ostberlin gewohnt und gearbeitet, aber erst jetzt nehme ich die StraBen wahr. Als hatte ich sechs

Monate lang im selben Stuck gespielt, und jetzt ist das Stuck abgespielt, und ich schaue das leere Biihnenbild an" (165).250 This unreality is not to be misunderstood as an attempt to exocitize East Berlin or as a touch of Ostalgie, but is rather once more the effect of the narrator's deliberate attempt to distance herself from the Other. In his article on Selfsame

Sterne's attempt to offer a "countermemory to present-day denigrations" of the German

249 This view from above, perhaps even a nod to Wim Wender's Der Himmel iiber Berlin, is emphasized for East Berlin: "[M]eine Arme waren Fliigel geworden, ich war ein Vogel, der iiber Ostberlin fliegen wtirde, der sich alle StraBen, iiber die Brecht und Besson je gelaufen sind, anschauen und vor Freunde lachen wird" (SS 34). 250 'For six months, I have lived and worked in East Berlin, but it is only now that I notice the streets. It is as if I had acted in the same play for six months, and now that the play is over, and I am looking at the empty stage set.' Here, a note on Ozdamar's use of the politically charged German equivalents of East and West Berlin: For the German Democratic Republic, West Berlin was written as Westberlin, whereas their own part was correctly called 'Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR.' For the Federal Republic, it was Berlin (West) and Berlin (Ost), or less formally, West- Berlin and Ost-Berlin. By choosing to call the two parts Ostberlin and Westberlin, Ozdamar extracts herself and her city from the power-strategies that inform both sides' official ways of naming these territories. That she is aware of these political battles fought via names becomes obvious in Seltsame Sterne when the protagonist first enters the German Democratic Republic by train. When she asks if they are already in "Ostdeutschland," the border guard corrects her, calling it the "Deutsche Demokratische Republik" (31). 133

Democratic Republic's former capital (141), John Pizer also points out that the work can clearly not be accused of Ostalgie, despite the narrator's at times seemingly unqualified celebration of East Berlin simplicity (145). Rather, considering the violence she has experienced in Istanbul and the violence she witnesses in West Berlin due to the activities of the Red Army Faction, the narrator's positive evaluation of the German Democratic

Republic seems to stem simply from the fact that it is, while certainly imperfect, at least better than its alternatives at the time, i.e. Istanbul and West Berlin (142). Instead of painting a nostalgic version of the past, the narrator approaches East Berliners as people whom she "noch nicht richtig verstand" but whom she nevertheless loves "so wie ich als

Kind meine GroBmutter geliebt hatte, ohne begreifen zu konnen, daB auch sie einmal ein

Kind gewesen war" (37).251 In Seltsame Sterne people and their stories are intentionally left unassimilated by the narrator's refusal to fully identify with them.

It is this refusal of identification that also determines Ozdamar's complex approach to the German past. Initially, it seems as if Ozdamar simply inserts herself in that past by identifying with the victims. This role is assigned to her by others, such as three drunks whose advances she rejects and who therefore exclaim: "Ab in die

Gaskammer" (166). More importantly, it is also assumed by herself. Thus, citing a blurb from a collection of her poetry, Else Lasker-Schiiler is described as a German poetess with Jewish themes, oriental fantasies, and a luscious, ostentatious, and gentle

German (15), which obviously parallels descriptions of Ozdamar herself. Yet this citation is interrupted by the barking of a dog, an animal associated with fascist war widows

251 'I didn't yet really understand'; 'in the way in which I loved my grandmother when I was a child, without being able to comprehend that she had once also been a child' 252 to the gas chamber.' 134

(Klocke 274), in order to point to Lasker-Schiiler's victimization and forced exile.253 The narrator also willingly identifies with the victims of the Holocaust when a neo-Nazi claiming pure Prussian blood makes advances to her. She rids herself of him by claiming that she is Jewish, warning him: "[R]ede nicht mit mir, sonst wird dein Blut beschmutzt"

(137).254 Her apparent identification with victims of Nazi Germany becomes most evident when she stays at a cottage in a forest through which Jews from Sachsenhausen had to walk on their death march. After having been told the story, sh

e gets up early in the morning to go to the forest to cry (114). Based on scenes such as these, Konuk Kader claims that Ozdamar approaches the German past by identifying with the victims of the Holocaust (235),255 She criticizes this approach for its attempt to participate in Germany's memory culture based on ahistorical identifications between Jews and Turks (236). Contemporary discrimination of Turks and other immigrants cannot simply be taken as paralleling German anti-Semitism, because this would ignore the historical specificities of the murder of German Jews.

However, a closer look at the most striking moment of apparent identification reveals that Ozdamar resists the drawing of such parallels:

Viele starben auf dem Weg. Klaus sagte: "Sachsenhausen war das KZ, in

dem der ganze Holocaust geplant worden ist." Jetzt schaue ich auf diese

Landschaft. Jetzt sind die Rehe, die Kraniche und die Krahen hier. Damals

253 Klocke obverses that the war of words, described in the novel as being the prolongation of a real war (55 65), "is unmistakably associated with World War II and the numerous dogs barking in the West. These animals serve as a constant reminder of Germany's fascist past since the soldiers' widows are said to have replaced their fallen husbands with dogs (274). For an interesting reading of the barking dog as embodying the voice of German victimization, see Konuk (240). 254 'Don't speak to me, otherwise your blood will be soiled.' 255 Laura Bradley also argues that the narrator's "response is to identify - as a member of a minority group in East and West Berlin—with Jewish suffering" (293). 135

muss es hier wie auf einem anderen Planeten ausgesehen haben,

Menschen wie Skelette unterm Mondschein. Die Augen groB. Kleider,

zerrissene Kleider, die mit dem Wind iiber die Landschaft fliegen. (114)

The narrator distances herself emotionally from the observed by citing a historical fact, a fact even further removed because it is put in the mouth of an absent character.

Moreover, likening the scene to a foreign planet, she admits her inability to imagine what it must have been like. Instead of thinking that she can approximate the feelings of the victims, she is reduced to merely invoking two images of their outer appearance. Using a form of Brecht's alienation effect, rendering that which happens unusual, strange, and not self-evident in order to open it up for reinvestigation (Brecht, Schriften 174-85), Ozdamar in fact draws attention to how incomprehensible and unknowable this seemingly well- known historical fact really is. As Lea Fridman points out, the first characteristic of the horror of the Holocaust is "that it can neither be believed nor put into words" (13) but rather, "by its nature, exceeds the ability of the mind to grasp it" (15). The Holocaust thus constitutes a radical alterity and limit to any attempts at being fully identified or identified with.257 Just as Ozdamar's narrator keeps a distance from her lover in Die

256 'Many died on the way. Klaus said: 'Sachsenhausen was the concentration camp in which the entire Holocaust was planned.' Now, I am looking at this landscape. Now there are dear, cranes, and crows. Back then, this place must have looked like a different planet, people like skeletons beneath the light of the moon. Large eyes. Clothes, torn clothes, which are flying across the landscape with the wind.' 257 The narrator's repeated allusion to Else Lasker-Schiiler (1869-1945) has to be seen in this context. Lasker-Schiiler was a successful German-Jewish poetess active in Berlin's artistic community. She had to flee Nazi Germany shortly after receiving the Kleist Prize in 1932, and spent the years of her exile in Switzerland and Israel. Lasker-Schiiler was an expert in costume and spectacle, walking the streets of German towns dressed in what was perceived as oriental dress, and was making an effort to distort biographical detail whenever possible (Kupper 291). It is therefore more likely that Lasker-Schiiler's importance to Ozdamar and her narrator lies in the performative (rather than Jewish) aspect of the poetess' life. Also, the narrator's self- identification as Jewess to a neo-Nazi, parallels her denial of being Kurdish to a Kurd (41). In both instances, the focus seems to be on opposing and undermining attempts at essentializing 136

Briicke, she here also keeps at a remove from the historical experience of the Jewish people, respecting their suffering as an Other. Any charge of her identifying with the victims of the Holocaust in order to insert herself in German history is thus misplaced.

That is not to say that Ozdamar's writing does not engage with German history at all. Commenting on the rehearsal of Die Bauern, an unidentified speaker, most likely either Fritz Marquardt or the narrator, comments that the "DDR im Jahr 1946 ist eine fremde Welt, nicht heutig" and that the rehearsal is "kein Ersatz fur Geschichtsunterricht, das Stuck ist kein Dokumentarspiel" (88).258 In the same way in which the play is not a substitute for historical documentation, so Seltsame Sterne does not claim to have any

"dokumentarischen Wert," despite claims made on the publisher's blurb. Respecting that East Berlin is unknown to her, the narrator treats it as if it were from a different world and time. Thus, items in a shop window are described as archaic, as if in a small museum, "Gegenstande aus einer anderen Zeit"(19).260 Not only objects but also East

Berlin residents, who inhabit their own "Zeit und Geheimnis" (37),261 are treated with such a distance. The narrator resists West German stereotyping descriptions of East

German women as sad and observes instead that their faces were "geheimnisvoll, wie

Rembrandts Selbstportraits" (19). Comparing or even converting their faces into pieces of art, the narrator reinvests them with mystery, with something that cannot be prejudged

ethnic and racial identity rather than on identifying with 'Jewishness,' which is after all an equally essentialized category. 258 "The GRD of the year 1946 is a foreign world, not today's'; 'no substitute for history lessons, the play is no docudrama'; Ozdamar's theatre sketches, reprinted in Seltsame Sterne, are partly of Fritz Marquardt's staging of Heiner Miiller's Die Bauern at the Volksbiihne in 1976. 259 The publisher's note speaks about the text's documentary value on account of the theatre sketches (i). 260 'objects from another time' 261 'time and secret' 262 'mysterious, like Rembrandt's self-portraits.' 137

but has to be known all over again. Rather than claiming to possess and be able to

mediate referential knowledge about aspects of the German past that took place before or

during her presence in the country, Ozdamar merely provides her impressions in a piece

of alienated and alienating art. Informed by Brecht, her art conveys impressions that

simultaneously familiarize and defamiliarize, but do not represent and inform.

Given this distanced approach to human and historical alterity, it remains to be

asked whether the narrator also keeps a distance from Berlin or whether that prevents her

from properly arriving in the German capital. When visiting her American lover Steve in

Copenhagen, the narrator observes:

Die Volksbuhne hat mich ruhig gemacht. Steve hat mehr Angst vor seiner

Stadt als ich. Ich will ihn beruhigen. Ostberlin in Kopenhagen. Uber

Steves Bett hangt ein Bild von einem Berg, der Blick aus seinem Fenster,

als er noch ein Kind war. Die Bergspitze ist schneebedeckt. Er erzahlte

von diesem Berg. (223)263

This passage illustrates what Ette calls Ozdamar's frequent use of cross-fading, borrowed

from film, in order to write various spaces into each other (189). Ozdamar continually

superimposes images of Istanbul on both Berlins, just as she encourages Steve to narrate

his childhood landscape onto Copenhagen in order to feel more comfortable there. Here,

it is significant that it is the Volksbuhne and a photograph or painting that allow both the

narrator and Steve to feel comfortable in their new cities. That is, it is by artistic means

such as cross-fading, acting, painting, or storytelling that the characters are able to make

263 'The Volksbuhne made me calm. Steve was more afraid of his city then I was. I want to calm him. East Berlin in Copenhagen. A picture of a mountain hangs above Steve's bed, the view out of his window when he was still a child. The top is covered in snow. He told me about this mountain.' 138 themselves at home in their cities of choice. This also becomes apparent when the narrator imagines following another lover to his home in England, which would involve

"eine andere Kultur in [s]ich aufnehmen, englische Docks, die Arbeiterklasse, Jack

London, Agatha Christie, Ein Portrait des Kunstlers als junger Mann von James Joyce, in den Morgenstunden die Milchmanner, Peter Brook, der Film Marat/Sade" (125).264

While she also mentions the necessity of learning English, the narrator overwhelmingly focuses on art as a necessary medium to enter England, just as she almost obsessively reads and watches literature, film, and theater in East Berlin. Her list of the theater plays she has already seen and of those she still plans to see fills an entire page of Selfsame

Sterne (103-4). Art allows the narrator entry into a city and culture while keeping her at a necessary distance.

Here, it is significant to point out that the narrator approaches Berlin by becoming familiar with international art. When she considers moving to England, her list of literature and films to read and watch is based on an exclusively English canon. In order to arrive in Berlin, on the other hand, the narrator reads literature and watches films and plays from Germany as well as from the rest of the world. In Seltsame Sterne, the lengthy list of plays she has already seen are written by Europeans, both East and West, South

Africans, East-Asians, and Americans (103-4). By means of art, and more specifically the theater stage, Berlin is thus connected with the rest of the world. Unlike in the case of the international student movement, whose internationality merely resulted in the fact that violence haunted both West Berlin and Istanbul, the international aspect of art does not

264 'to take in another culture, English docks, the working classes, Jack London, Agatha Christie, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, milkmen in the morning hours, Peter Brook, the movie Marat/Sade' 139 cause any harm. Rather, it ensures that, while Berlin is a safe place, it is by no means cut off or isolated but connected to Europe and the world.

In the end, Ozdamar's narrator indeed arrives in Berlin, making it her theater, her

Wohngemeinschaft, and her brothel (155).265 Berlin thus figures as a point of refuge. The narrator does not have to leave Berlin forever, as Besson does, admonishing her not to stay in Germany for too long and telling her: "Rette dich vor Deutschland" (236).266

Besson's admonition and departure from Germany is set in the context of Wolf

Biermann's expatriation in 1976 and the arrest of Rudolph Bahro in 1977. The attempt to silence these two intellectuals, who were critical but ultimately supportive of the German

Democratic Republic's overall project, resulted in the loss of faith in the German

Democratic Republic by many intellectuals and artists who had hoped that internal critique could lead to reforms. Strongly disappointed, many of these left the German

Democratic Republic at the end of the 70s.267 While Ozdamar's narrator leaves with

Besson, thus remaining loyal to him and the theater rather than going to America with

Steve (245), she eventually returns to Berlin. Unlike Istanbul, which she had to leave since her close involvement in politics made her existence there untenable, she does not have to escape Berlin. For her, Berlin is a city from whose Worterkrieg and politics she is able to keep a critical distance (65). Because she never allows herself to become

265 Returning to West Berlin after her long-term visa expires, the narrator has managed to claim both parts of the city as her own, indicated by a proliferation of possessive adjectives. She is sad to no longer be living in that part of Berlin where the Volksbuhne, "mein Theater" (154) was. At the same time, she is also happy to return home to "meiner Wohngemeinschaft," observing the curtains of "unserem Puff' downstairs (155). 266 'Save yourself from Germany.' 267 In 2002, and thus known to the author, Besson in fact returns to Berlin with his French performance of Brecht's Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Causasion Chalk Circle), the play Ozdamar assisted in when going to Paris with him, thus in a sense closing one of her circles. 140 swallowed by either East or West Berlin ideologies, there is nothing in Berlin from which she has to save herself. 141

CHAPTER VI. Zaimoglu's German Amok: Escaping Decadent Berlin

Gut, ich verstehe dich. Du hast dich zuriickgezogen, du willst die Warme deiner inneren Organe spiiren, du willst ganz nah an deinen Eingeweiden sein. Du klagst sie alle an: den Markt, die SpieBer, die Opportunisten und so weiter. (Zaimoglu, German Amok 59)268

In this chapter, I start by showing that Feridun Zaimoglu's novel German Amok depicts

Berlin as a hypersexualized city. Unlike the depictions of sexuality in Weimar Berlin and in a large number of post-Wende Berlin literature, German Amok does not exploit sexuality for its transgressive and metaphorical potential. Instead, Berlin emerges as a decadent capitalist Western city that has to be escaped from. As I proceed to argue, the trope of a sexualized Berlin instead cites former socialist and present fundamentalist

Muslim critiques of the capitalist West as suffering from the wholesale commodification of all aspects of life. While Zaimoglu's text endorses some key elements of this criticism, my final section reveals that he ultimately rejects any kind of political or religious movement that promises salvation. Instead, Zaimoglu points to an apolitical and privately lived religiosity as the only means of escape from commodification. The novel thus figures as Zaimoglu's partly satirical, partly serious accusation of all Germans,

Europeans, fundamentalists, "und so weiter."

268 'Alright, I get it, you have withdrawn, you want to feel the warmth of your inner organs, you want to be as close as possible do your entrails. You accuse all of them: the market, the petty bourgeois, the opportunists and so on.' Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German to English are mine. 142

Sex, Filth, and the Wohlstandsgesellschaft

Zaimoglu's novel German Amok (2002) was received without popular or critical acclaim. 2fiQ His celebrated Kanak Sprak: 24 Mifitone vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1995) was hailed as "a key factor in a quantum leap in awareness of Turkish-German themes in

German culture" and rendered Zaimoglu a "folk hero amongst multi-ethnic youth"

(McGowan, "Turkish-German" 201, 203). In contrast, most reviewers reacted to his second novel with dismissiveness or indignation. Compared to Zaimoglu's other works,

German Amok also received little attention from scholarly critics.270 Most of this rejection seems to stem from the fact that the novel's obsession with sex, described in detailed, often vulgar and obscene language, apparently serves little purpose. While

Zaimoglu's obsession with sexual intercourse and imagery generally has been celebrated as, for example, subverting exoticized ethnic masculinity, most critics fail to see anything new or worth talking about in its use in German Amok. I will argue, however, that

Zaimoglu's hypersexualized imagery in German Amok captures and comments on increasingly important current discourses concerning a supposed Western and European decadence.

In 2007, Karsten Fischer joined other German scholars and intellectuals in contributing to a special issue of the periodical Merkur, entitled Kein Wille zur Macht:

269 Zaimoglu authored several other books on the figure of the Kanake, an initially derogatory term used for immigrants and other foreigners, which was appropriated as a term of self- identification in a fashion similar to terms like nigger or queer in the mid-90s, including Abschaum (Scum, 1997), Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rander der Gesellschaft (Headstuff: Kanaka speak from the margins of society, 1998), and Kopf und Kragen (Risking your neck, 2001). 270 In fact, only Patricia Anne Simpson's article truly engages with the novel, arguing for the importance of gender difference and awareness in the process of normalization and the author's resistance to cultural and ethnic profiling (83-4). Yiiksel Pazarkaya and Stuart Taberner also discuss the novel in some detail. Other scholars elsewhere interested in Zaimoglu, such as Cheesman or Adelson, merely mention it. 143

971 Dekadenz. Most contributors essentially agreed that, as the issue's summary states, it is paradoxically worthwhile to fight for 'our', i.e. Western European, decadence. In his article, Fischer opposes Occidentalism, which he defines elsewhere as the "project of an anti-modernist fundamentalism" practiced mostly by fundamentalist Islam, which attacks

"the Western lifestyle as decadent moral decline" and opposes "urbanity, a bourgeois way of life, rationality, and feminism" (Fischer, "Fundamentalist" 177-8). In the Merkur essay, Fischer argues that dealing with this "Dekadenzruge" is an urgent task:

Der Umgang mit ihm gehort zu den derzeit groBten und wichtigsten

politischen Herausforderungen, angesichts der Tatsache, daB der

islamische Fundamentalismus das Bild eines im Zuge von

Individualismus, Hedonismus und Pazifismus moralisch hoffnungslos

dekadenten Abendlandes zeichnet und jedwede 'westoxication' bekampft.

1st es anstelle des ohnmachtigen Protests gegen dieses auch innerhalb des

Westens selbskritsich verbreitete Zerrbild vielleicht richtiger und

aussichtsreicher, sich offensiv zu den bemangelten Werten

beziehungsweise Wertverlusten zu bekennen? ("Dekadenz" 898)272

In her essay "Verteidigung des dekadenten Europa" (Defense of the decadent Europe) in the same issue of Merkur, Ulrike Ackermann cautions:

271 'No will to power: decadence' 272 'Dealing with [the accusation of decadence] presently poses one of the greatest and most important political challenges, considering that Islamic fundamentalism draws a picture of the Occident as having become morally hopelessly decadent as a result of individualism, hedonism, and pacifism, and fights against all forms of 'westoxication.' Instead of helplessly protesting against such a distorted image, which is also current in the self-critical West, would it perhaps be more correct and promising to avow ourselves aggressively to these criticized values or respectively to the loss of values?' 144

Die Toleranz gegenuber der Praxis anderer Religionen ist eingebettet in

einen profunden Multikulturalismus, der in Deutschland mit Verweis auf

den nationalsozialistischen Reinheits- und Homogenitatswahn mahnend

beschworen wird. Doch in der Verherrlichung anderer, fremder Kulturen,

dem Lobgesang auf das Urspriingliche, Unverdorbene, frei von

kapitalistischen Uberformungen, schwingt zugleich ein antiwestliches und

antiliberales Ressentiment mit. Marktstrategen etablieren den Ethnolook

profitabel in der Modebranche, nach dem Motto: Versohnung statt Kampf

der Kulturen. (897)273

It is worthwhile quoting both Fischer and Ackermann at some length since these two passages illustrate how intertwined issues of the sex, consumer culture, the Holocaust, art, capitalism, multiculturalism, decadence, and religion are in today's Germany, and in particular since 9/11. If nothing else, Zaimoglu's German Amok illustrates this discourse, literally embodying it in the behaviour and attitudes of his characters acting in and around

Berlin.

German Amok is set in Berlin soon after the fall of the Wall.274 Its unnamed male first-person narrator, whose Turkish ethnicity is indexed but not emphasized, is an unsuccessful realist painter alienated from, but simultaneously dependent on, this art

273 'In Germany, tolerance of the practices of other religions is embedded in a profound multiculturalism summoned forth by pointing the finger at the national-socialist craze for purity and homogeneity. However, in the glorification of other, foreign cultures, and the glorification of those deemed original, unspoiled, and free of capitalist deformation, there is always also an element of anti-Western and anti-liberal resentment. Marketing strategists profitably mainstream the ethno-look in the world of fashion, following the motto: reconciliation instead of a clash of cultures.' 274 This temporal setting becomes apparent on several occasions, most markedly when the East German driver giving the narrator a ride to the Brandenburg village asks for 30 "Westmark" (113), suggesting that there still existed the East German Mark, which was abolished on July 1st, 1990. 145 scene, which he overtly despises. The scene's artists, represented and led by a performance artist calling herself "Kunstfotze" (art cunt), define their art against everything that may be perceived as normal or bourgeois. The Kunstfotze not only controls the art scene but also the narrator, who depends on the material support she provides in exchange for his sexual servitude. In the second half of the book, the narrator leaves Berlin to spend three weeks in former Russian military barracks in a village in

Brandenburg, where he is employed as an artist for a dance workshop organized by OPP

TIKK, her husband Daniel, and another artist called Mauritius Pink. There, the narrator tries to manoeuvre himself unscathed through internal group intrigues, fuelled by the group organizers' and participants' incessant power and sex games. Shortly before the group's final performance for the villagers, the narrator brings his mentally unstable and auto-aggressive neighbour Clarissa from Berlin to the workshop. Untouched by all other events in the novel, the narrator is affected by the death of this disturbed young woman, the only character he had any genuine emotions for.

German Amok's Berlin is one of decay and chaos, comparable to "einem offenen

Verwesungsfeld" in which "die Menschen in Ost und West ducken und treten, wo sie nur

konnen (153), in a "fur immer verfluchten und vergammelnden Metropole" (51).275 As

Leslie Adelson points out in her discussion of Zaimoglu's Kanak Sprak, his Kanak characters often reverse the stereotypes of dirty Turks and other foreigners and instead associate anything dirty and filthy with German society. For instance, his characters are portrayed as being afraid of "being infected by German crises" such as the Holocaust

(100). In German Amok, the physical dirt and filth of the city is accompanied by the

275 'an open field of decomposition', 'people in East and West duck and kick wherever they can,' 'forever cursed and decaying metropolis' 146 metaphorical filthiness of the members of the Berlin art scene, which becomes most obvious considering their sexual hyperactivity.

The association of Berlin with sexual activity enjoys a long history. As Kathrina

Gerstenberger points out, the trope of Berlin as a site of sexual encounter and experiences was firmly established by texts such as Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and

Irmgard Keun's Das kunstseidene Madchen (1932). Thematizing prostitution and pimping, these novels helped to consolidate Berlin's reputation as a city prone to all the

"socio-sexual ills of a great metropolis" (Gerstenberger 26). Between the wars, Weimar

Berlin was in fact (in)famous for its "risque and titillating image" (Nenno 215). This image was also supported by public figures. One of these was Anita Berber (1899-1928), a nude dancer of considerable notoriety and celebrated by some as "a symbol of the decadence, the perversity, and the bisexuality, and the drugs of her time" (Flinn 353).

Zaimoglu seems to have had Berber, who was immortalized by Otto Dix's Portrait of the

Dancer Anita Berber (1925), in mind when creating the character of the Kunstfotze, a name the latter chose for herself for the sake of publicity (German Amok 47).276 Like

Berber, the Kunstfotze performs nude, sensationalizes herself, has male and female lovers, and uses cocaine (9, 44).277 However, whereas Berber truly lives the figure she portrays and pays the ultimate price, her abused body dying before she reaches 30, the

Kunstfotze's supposed subversive acts are mere publicity stunts, empty of any real subversive power and at no cost to their performer. Moreover, Berber's nudity, instead of being erotic or titillating, was aimed at revealing a self that is physically and emotionally

276 Anita Berber's story was reanimated by Rosa von Praunheim's film Anita: Tame des Lasters (1987). 277 Kunstfotze may also be an allusion to the 1990 drama MauerStiicke by Manfred Karge, a scene of which is called 'Ostfotze' (Grub 615). 147 bare (Funkenstein 27), whereas the Kunstfotze's success is based merely on "Pornoliebe"

(Zaimoglu 22). The artistic authenticity of Weimar Berlin, Zaimoglu suggests, is a thing of the past.

The trope of Berlin as a sexualized topos has enjoyed renewed popularity in texts written since the reunification of Germany. Gerstenberger discusses a lengthy list of such texts, which includes Thomas Brussig's Helden wie wir (1996), Julia Frank's Liebediener

(1999), Judith Hermann's Sommerhaus, spater (1998), Tanja Driicker's Spielzone (1999),

Inka Parei's Die Schattenboxerin (1999), Christa Schmidt's Eselsfest (1999), or

§enocak's Der Erottomane (1999). German Amok could easily be added to the list (see

Schmidt 205). Similar to Brussig's Berlin, Zaimoglu's is marked by "sexual conquest and capitalist decadence" (Gerstenberger 27). However, whereas Gerstenberger's concludes that the surveyed texts' "[l]literary depictions of sexuality continue to mark the boundaries of convention and appeal to the reader through scenarios of transgression"

(25), there is neither transgression nor any appeal in Zaimoglu's use of sexual imagery.

In fact, the narrator's descriptions of his various sexual performances generally lack any erotic or titillating aspect. For instance, he repeatedly has to perform oral sex with the

Kunstfotze in exchange for goods and money, which is described in detail but as a task made odious by pubic hair stubble or the taste of disinfectant lotions. The narrator also describes how he masturbates while looking at the mentally disturbed Clarissa's back.

Clarissa offers her naked sight to the narrator in exchange for his leaving her girlfriend alone. After he directs the way in which Clarissa, whose body is repulsively disfigured by auto-aggressive acts, should stand, so that he does not have to see her mutilated vagina, the narrator tells about his masturbation as a matter of mechanics: "Es geht schnell, ich 148

gebe mir alle Miihe. Auf ein Wort von mir beginnt sie sich anzuziehen" (204).278 While

the reader witnesses the process of dressing, the act itself apparently is not worth

describing on paper. Similarly, even though the mostly heterosexual narrator describes

being aroused at the sight of his acquaintance Pink's nudity, his anal penetration of Pink

amounts to rape, devoid of any erotic, let alone emotional, exchange: "Ich ficke ihn wie

ein Vergewaltiger, und er stoBt mit dem Kopf immer wieder an die Wand, doch es macht

ihm nichts aus, und mir ist es egal" (235).279 Despite the narrator's brutality, the scene

does not allow for any sympathy with Pink, who seeks degrading and servile sexual

games with several characters and asks the narrator to visit him again. No homosexual,

voyeuristic, sadomasochistic, or sadistic sexual practices seem to truly affect or disturb

any of the novel's sex obsessed characters. Since their potentially transgressive behaviour

has become the new norm agreed to by all, there is little room for any real transgression.

Throughout the text, sexual activity is also dissociated from any significance

beyond the act itself and is devoid of emotional or moral sentiment. As the narrator

remarks: "[E]s bedeutet am Ende nichts. Ich bin das Mannchen, das sie benutzen, sie sind

die Weibchen, die ich benutze. Kein Gott stiitzt diese Konvention" (182).280 That is,

sexual intercourse does not have any transcendent aspect to it. Instead of being an intense

expression of human connection, sex here does not allow any of the characters to

overcome their individual isolation. Unlike a number of post-unification Berlin texts that

use a combination of eros and thanatos to emphasize and keep alive the city's traumatic

past, German Amok's use of themes of sexuality and violence, including self-mutilation

278 'It goes fast. I make a real effort. At my signal, she starts to get dressed.' 279 'I fuck him like I'm a rapist, and he hits his head against the wall over and over again, but he doesn't mind, and I don't care' 280 'it does not mean anything in the end. I am the male that they use, they are the females that I use. There is no god underwriting this convention.' 149

281 and rape, also do not point to any greater significance. Rather, the text's depiction of sex as devoid of any meaning moves the novel closer to pop literature. So-called pop literature enjoyed considerable prominence in late-1990s Berlin, represented by writers such as Christian Kracht, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, and Florian lilies (Liesegang

262). This literature is marked by its setting in the present or immediate past, and usually has a first-person narrator who describes his daily life, lacks stable relationships with peers, family, class, and subculture, and "takes an unfocussed position within society"

(263). Like pop literature, German Amok focuses on the present, and its reader receives no insight into where its main characters come from, what their socio-economic background is, or whether they have any family or close friends.

Despite such similarities, German Amok departs significantly from pop literature by not participating in one of its main characteristics, that is, depicting its characters' obsession with consumer culture. Yiiksel Pazarkaya argues that Zaimoglu's characters are West-German grandchildren of the "Wirtschaftswundergeneration" who turn away from their generation '68 parents - of course without saying no to the latter's money - and instead turn to subcultures, indulge in the consumption of brand names, and drift "im

Sinn entleerten Uberdrusses im Schlaraffenland" (149).282 While Pazarkaya thus aptly characterizes the group producing and consuming pop literature, his characterization does not really capture the cast of characters in German Amok. Granted, most of its characters celebrate their artistic subculture. Yet there is actually a marked absence of any of the status symbols so typical of pop literature in the novel. The occasional car and clothes are

281 Gerstenberger points out that in much post-unification Berlin texts, "[n]arratives of sexuality and violence, from ritualized and voluntary relationships to self-mutilation and rape [...] keep open the city's metaphorical wounds" (48). 282 The "Wirtschaftswunder" or economic miracle is the West German economic boom that began in the 1950s, 'in the tedium of the land of plenty emptied of meaning' 150 never identified with brand names and the only items the narrator purchases or is given in exchange for sexual favours are food and painting utensils. In fact, the narrator is notoriously short on cash, so he has to prostitute himself and even tries his luck as a halal butcher in a slaughter house (94). In addition, there is no mention of any of the characters being able to rely on parental support or any kind of inheritance. No one - be it the drug dealing Carlos, the underage prostitute Rosa, the mentally ill Clarissa, or the chronically broke narrator - seems to have parents, or at least none willing to share the fruits of the

Wirtschaftswunder.283

Unburdened Berlin

Rather than aligning himself with the comfortable nihilism of the pop generation,

Zaimoglu invokes some of its elements to comment on the debate surrounding the proper attitude towards Germany's historical burden after reunification, a weight the ultra-light pop literature decided to shed. This debate came to the forefront in the 1990 German-

German Literaturstreit. Occasioned by but also extending beyond Christa Wolfs Was bleibt, the Literaturstreit refocused issues that had already been present in earlier assessments of German literature and that would continue to prompt public debate throughout the 1990s. In the 1980s Karl Heinz Bohrer voiced his critique of what he saw as a predominantly politically committed post-war literature in both the German

Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. Bohrer favoured French decadents and English aestheticists instead, whose aesthetic modernism lacked any

283 In fact, the only character in the entire novel said to have a father is Ersin, the Hodja's son that became a radical Muslim. However, on account of his son's religious fervor, his father feels completely estranged from him (90). Be that as it may, given that the Hodja is a first generation immigrant living off the contributions of the members of the mosque, he represents a part of society that never partook in the German economic miracle in the first place. 151 concern for morality and politics, and who produced art for art's sake (Brockmann,

Literature 71). It was only after German reunification, however, that Bohrer's argument gained in popularity. Thus, strongly influenced by Bohrer, Frank Schirrmacher saw the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany as the occasion to break with the politically committed literature of the Federal Republic (74). Taking one side in the

Literaturstreit, critics such as Schirrmacher and Ulrich Greiner called for a 19th-century aestheticist's I'art pour I'art that would put an end to German literature's obsessive focus on the country's past and its Gesinnungsasthetik (aesthetics of moral principle), offering instead "a normal history and a normal literature" for an "increasingly normal Germany"

(78).284 In her discussion of contemporary German literature in 2008, Patricia Anne

Simpson observes that the burden of the past in German literature has indeed gotten lighter, at least in so far as an engagement with this past no longer seems to be mandatory

("Degrees" 82). However, as the following will show, and as Simpson does not fail to point out, some texts such as Zaimoglu's German Amok challenge the notion that history can simply be sidelined in Germany.

It would be an utter misrepresentation of Zaimoglu's text to accord the narrator any refined sensitivity in his dealings with Germany's history. On the contrary, the narrator and other characters freely allude to it, reveling in politically incorrect allusions, and Zaimoglu often uses words that invoke an affective baggage that is incongruous with the context. For example, the narrator observes the Kunstfotze snorting cocaine before one of their sex-sessions and then waits "bis Goebbels mit der Peitsche knallt" (44).285

The narrator, while forced to sleep with the Kunstfotze for material gain, is hardly a

284 For summaries and interpretations of the Literaturstreit, see Finlay's and Hahn's essays. 285 'until Goebbles cracks the whip' 152 victim comparable to those of the Holocaust. OPP TIKK, the Bhutto inspired Japanese leader of the dance workshop, similarly invokes Nazi terminology indiscriminately, calling an attractive workshop participant "eine arische Spitzenziichtung" (120).286 The narrator amuses himself at the expense of the other members of the dance workshop, ironically suggesting that they form a "Wehrsporttruppe West" in order to defend themselves against the local East German neo-Nazi youth threatening them (160). Pink, apparently completely ignorant of that fact that Wehrsportgruppen are neo-Nazi and fascist paramilitary organizations, forms the troop and takes no issue with being identified as the "Truppenfiihrer" (224).287 The most famous of such groups, the

Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, was active in West Germany in the 70s and 80s (Davies

216). This shows that neo-Nazism is by no means merely a problem in the provinces of the former German Democratic Republic, as many West Germans, including Pink, would still like to believe.

Comparing these examples reveals that the narrator leaves his and OPP TIKK's use of Nazi terminology and metaphors uncommented whereas he ridicules Pink, suggesting that, as a German, Pink ought to have known better. Therefore, the narrator criticizes Pink's concept for the dance troupe's performance, the third act of which is called "Totalgas" (total gas) and consists of the actors wearing shower caps while fake deadly gas is streaming from oversized shower heads (215). In a rare moment of taking a position, the narrator tells Pink that he should not make the extermination of the Jewish people into a kitsch and cheap metaphor, alluding to Adorno by claiming that "[n]ach

286 'an Aryan thoroughbred' 287 Zaimoglu intentionally makes liberal use of the term 'Fiihrer' throughout the text. Auschwitz ist das Gas als Metapher tabu" (217).288 Pink defends his plan by asserting that he is merely opposing German self-hatred and glibly adding that the narrator, as a

"Fremder" (foreigner), is not entitled to enter this apparently exclusive German discussion (217).289 Simpson interprets the narrator's later sexual conquest and victory over Pink, from which the narrator walks away free of shame or guilt, as an assertion of the narrator's "historical superiority as well" ("Degrees" 85). Attributing historical superiority to the narrator, however, seems misplaced, since he does not have a more adequate historical understanding or sensitivity than Pink. His lack of any superiority becomes apparent in his description of one of his paintings. The painting depicts Rosa, a young prostitute marketed as an Armenian whose adoptive parents beat her until she forgets Armenian, and with whom the narrator fell in love when he was younger.

Reflecting back, the narrator claims that he was merely in love with the idea of being able to sleep for free with a "blutjunge Nutte, von der es hieB, sie sei Armenierin" (71).290

Coming from a Muslim Turk and in light of the Armenian genocide I discuss in the context of §enocak's writing, the narrator's guilt-free and unreflective admission of his objectification of a prostitute whose appeal lies in being Armenian, is almost as historically irresponsible as Pink's use of the gas metaphor. Thus, while the novel alludes to the issues raised by the Literaturstreit and mocks rather than embodies the kind of decadent aestheticism advocated by Bohrer, Zaimoglu is not really interested in judging

288 'after Auschwitz, gas as a metaphor is taboo' 289 Similarly, the narrator is denied an opinion regarding the more recent German past, that is, German reunification. When he rightfully calls Pink and Daniel's planned performance "Wendeimperialismus" and accuses them of reveling in "der Rolle des Volkserzieher"(132), his opinion is dismissed on the basis of the assertion that he as a Moslem knows as little about art as East Germans do. Zaimoglu here comments on the idea that, after unification and confronted with a German other, Germany's non-German others were suddenly more excluded than they had been before the fall of the Wall. 290 'a very young whore, of whom they said that she was Armenian' 154 the proper relationship between artistic representation and German history. Instead,

German Amok is concerned much more with another form of decadence: that is, with the way in which Berlin's art industry appropriates history in a capitalist present.

Byzantine Berlin

The artists and the narrator instrumentalize history for their personal gain, whether it is in order to advance their artistic career or to satisfy their sexual needs. If the characters know about historical facts in the first place, they manage to reduce them to commodities in their own version of what Norman Finkelstein controversially called the Holocaust

Industry.291 This wholesale commodification of all aspects of life, be it of people's bodies or of history, is connected to the novel's critical commentary on capitalism. As Stuart

Taberner rightly observes, German Amok invokes the trope of the Western colonization of the former East Germany and illustrates that both have since become part of a global capitalist economy (German Literature 97). A section entirely in italics and told by a narrative voice not identifiable with the first person narrator recounting the rest of the novel, provides a diatribe against the former East. It claims that the demise of the socialist system was inevitable and that one now has to mercilessly impose the capitalist system on the former East (Zaimoglu 110). The first-person narrator, on the other hand, often uses the socialist terminology that the former German Democratic Republic employed to criticize former West Germany. Thus, the capitalist system is repeatedly connected with the parasitic, a term used by, for example, Lenin when he wrote about the parasitism and decay of capitalism in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

291 See Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering for a critique of what he sees as the exploitation of the Holocaust by American Jews. 155

(1917). In German Amok, the new economy of the unified Germany is called a

"Parasitenwirtschaft" (112) and the narrator identifies the West German members of the dance workshop as parasites (115). Julia Bodenburg argues that the novel's use of parasitic metaphors indicates that "der 'deutsche Volkskorper' schon von innen zerfressen ist und sich selbst zerstort."292 While that may be the case, it is more relevant to emphasize that the narrator is citing the socialist terminology that had been used by the now past 'other' Germany.

The proliferation in Zaimoglu's text of partly invented terms appropriated from and reminding of Marxist and Leninist economic theory such as "Wendeimperialismus"

0German Amok 132), "durchkapitalisieren" (110), or "Morphium und Masse" (110),293 shows that this allusion to the socialist critique of capitalism is intentional. This becomes most apparent considering the title given to the dance workshop's performance: "Ost

Hiitte - West Palast" (47).294 As Taberner points out, this title cites Volker Braun's famous Wende-poem "Das Eigentum" first published in 1990, opening with the lines:

"Da bin ich noch: mein Land geht in den Westen./ KRIEG DEN HUTTEN, FRIEDE

DEN PALASTEN" (Taberner, German Literature 98, Braun 141).295 By inverting Georg

Buchner's slogan of Der Hessische Landbote (1834), Braun's poem registers the complaint that whereas the palaces of the former German Democratic Republic have remained intact, it was the workers in the mills and in their huts who have suffered as a consequence of the country's having joined the Federal Republic's capitalist economic system (Grub 460-1). German Amok thus thematizes a well-known argument that has

292 'the 'German people's body' is already being eroded from inside and destroying itself 293 Zaimoglu's oeuvre is filled with neologisms and puns such as these. 294 'East Hut- West Palace' 295 'Property', 'I am still here: my country is going West./ War against the huts/mills, peace for the palaces.' (98) 156 been part of public discourse since reunification, namely that reunification was an annexation of the East by the capitalist West, rather than a unification of two countries and economic systems.

Zaimoglu's above outlined use of pornographic descriptions and the frequent mention of prostitution also allude to the language of deviant sexuality and decadence that formed a central propagandistic part of the socialist critique of capitalism. The

Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the German Democratic Republic's governing party,

"equated capitalism with bad sex [as] exploitative, commodified, dehumanizing, and essentially unfulfilling" and rejected pornography and prostitution as being extreme forms of Western capitalist exploitation (Sharp 351). Zaimoglu's hypersexualized Berlin appears like a picture drawn by a socialist propagandist, its streets literally and metaphorically littered with "Menschendreck" (human dirt), which the narrator suggests may simply be "der naturliche Auswurf der auf asthetische Standards kapitalisierten

Gegenden" (191). German Amok's focus on violence and sexuality thus does not so much serve any transgressive purpose or as a means to keep open the wounds of German trauma as suggested by the texts surveyed by Gerstenberger. Rather, it echoes a critique of (West) Berlin that has tradition: the West as lost in what the character Daniel calls its

"byzantinische Dekadenz" (76).297

However, Zaimoglu does not merely invoke former socialist critiques of the West, which are by now part of its past rather than present. Instead, his text points to an uncannily similar discourse regaining force in Europe since the end of the Cold War, now voiced from a different East. As the quotations from Fischer and Ackermann at the

296 'the natural secretion of neighbourhoods capitalized according to aesthetic standards' 297 'byzantine decadence' 157 beginning of this chapter illustrate, the narrator's cousin is by no means alone in her belief that the "Europaer erlebe das byzantinische Stadium seines Niedergangs" (124).298

While set in the early 1990s, German Amok was written in 2002, and any focus on merely a socialist critique of capitalism would be an anachronism untypical of Zaimoglu, a writer known for his engagement with current politics. It is much more likely that Zaimoglu's implicit focus is on the criticism leveled against the West by some Islamic factions, who have taken over the task of criticizing Europe in Europe's stead, as well as on the language by which this critique is being answered.

Zaimoglu's text in fact directly answers such assertions as Ackermann's, cited above, which claim a profound multicultural tolerance as Germany's and Europe's own.

In contrast to Bogdal's assessment of German Amok's Germany as a new, urban, global, and multi-ethnic country (23), a closer look at the novel shows that even its seemingly leftist-liberal art scene members' multicultural tolerance is merely superficial. While the

Kunstfotze capitalizes on the display of her tolerance, having married an Afro-German and sleeping exclusively with men from other ethnicities, her tolerance ends when one of her exoticized boy toys asserts his own agency and breaks up with her.299 Unaware of the irony, she tells him that men like him should not even be allowed to enter the country legally (68), as if defying her wishes were a crime. When the narrator jokingly suggests that the Kunstfotze make a Muslim circumcision ritual into a public performance, the

298 'the European is experiencing the Byzantine phase of his decline'; Concerning Europe's ability to criticize itself, Yoko Tawada somewhat sarcastically points out: "Es ist nicht einfach, [Europa] zu kritisieren, weil [es] sich selbst standig kritisiert, und zwar so schnell und so gut, dass kein anderer das besser konnte. [...] Europa ist eine Meisterin der Kritik, und das macht eine ihrer Eigenschaften aus" (Talisman 47-48). 'It is not easy to criticize Europe, because it always criticizes itself, and it does so in such a fast and thorough fashion, that no one could do it better. [...] Europe is the master of criticism, and that is one of its characteristics.' 299 Towards the end of the novel, the Kunstfotze actually makes an effort to sustain an affair with a German without ethnic or immigrant background (187). 158

Kunstfotze is enthused, claiming: "Fremdheit muB operiert werden, das heiBt

Ethnochirurgie! Und: Fremdheit muB unterhalten, das heiBt Erlebnispark bei freiem

Eintritt" (49).300 Ethnic otherness is welcome as long as it is useful, which means marketable. Ironically, this entails that Daniel, ethnically German, lacks

"Marktgangigkeit, er ist nicht nichtdeutsch, nicht amerikanisch schwul, nicht ethnisch different" (149).301 As Taberner aptly points out, the fashionability of the ethnic other is epitomized by one of the novel's character's "own highly suspect contribution to the multicultural dialogue: 'Auslander rein in meine Jungfrauenmose'" (German Literature

96).302 Being marketable of course does not necessarily equate to being economically successful: It is the Kunstfotze and Daniel, both Germans, who are the only ones ultimately making a profit from their use of Others.303 Zaimoglu illustrates that whereas ethnic alterity, similar to sexual experimentation, may once have held at least the promise for a subversion of the status quo, it now has become subsumed by the structures of capitalist society.304

300 'Foreigness has to be operated on, it's called ethnosurgery. And: Foreigness has to entertain, that is called an amusement park with free admission' 301 'marketability, he is not non-German, not American gay, not ethnically different' 302 'foreigners welcome in my virgin-cunt'; Zaimoglu here overtly alludes to the neo-Nazi rallying cry 'Auslander Raus.' The character's notion that sleeping with foreigners would be evidence of her tolerance or acceptance of others is of course misguided, given that racism and sexual desire for the ethnicized or racialized body are of course not mutually exclusive. 303 Daniel's dance workshop, for instance, depends on his Japanese wife's claims to know and be able to teach Bhutto. The fact that OPP TIKK can hardly be seen as victimized since she is very aware of and willing to capitalize on her exoticized otherness, does not change that fact that Daniel stands only to profit from her. It would be equally wrong to cast the narrator in the role of the disempowered and exoticized male. He certainly also uses and objectifies the people around him. However, at least he does so indiscriminately, sleeping with women and men from Turkish, Japanese, and German backgrounds. 304 Taberner in fact argues that German Amok's most important aspect is "the way the novel positions its representations of German society's sudden enthusiasm for its ethnic minorities 159

Religious Exit

Zaimoglu's novel raises the question of how to escape these capitalist structures after the end of the socialist German Democratic Republic. Even if it was ultimately unsuccessful and the hopes invested in it were Utopian, the German Democratic Republic had provided

Germany with a place from which to criticize its capitalist other. Now, it is uncertain where the characters of German Amok, marked by the desire to escape their present capitalist system, can escape to. Looking at the members of the dance workshop, the narrator observes that they are not fascists but "in der richtigen Verfassung, um es nach einigen Jahren erfolgloser Heilssuche ernsthaft in Erwagung zu Ziehen" (115). In their desire for some kind of salvation, they are not really all that different from the Hodja's son Ersin, who is a late convert to radical Islam, tries to get away from the "ScheiBe [...] aus der er quoll" (90), and claims that when he and his co-believers come to power, they will cut the throats of the "Unglaubigen" (unbelievers) (90). The militarization of fundamentalist Islam is mirrored by that of the workshop members, whose

Wehrsporttruppe ironically mirrors the neo-fascists they set out to combat. All three groups thus prove the pessimistic narrator's point that "[w]enn es hart auf hart geht,

within a broader analysis of the impact of globalization, neo-liberalism, and cultural colonization" (German Literature 97). 305 'in the right state of mind to actually consider it after years of being on an unsuccessful quest for salvation'; In his short story "Gottes Krieger," Zaimoglu also addresses this notion that militant Islam is taken over the task of critiquing capitalism previously assigned to the former Eastern Bloc. One of his characters, a militant fundamentalist teacher, claims: "Die einzige Gefahr, die Byzanz-Babylon-Europa droht, kommt von uns, von unseren Sprengstoff-beladenen Korpern. Die Bolschwesiten haben ausgedient" (131). 'The only danger threatening Byzantium- Babylon-Europe comes from us, from our explosively charged bodies. The Bolshevists are obsolete.' For an insightful reading of the religious aspects of this short story, see Margaret Litter's essay "Profane und religiose Intensitaten." 306 'the shit from which he bubbled up' 160 besinnt sich der ganze Stamm auf die Schwerttanze der Alten Welt" (231).307 It follows that escape is not possible for members either of the German or the non-German tribe.

Fortunately, however, the narrator's pessimistic echoing of Samuel Huntington's thesis of the inevitable and violent clash of civilizations is undermined by the one figure whose otherness remains other and who escapes, albeit questionably so, at the end of the novel.308

Clarissa is the novel's true outsider, "eine Fremde, [...] wesenhaft fremdartig"

(231).309 Unlike all other characters, she for instance does not engage in empty mechanical sex but is drawn exclusively to women and is actually in love with the one she is sleeping with (198). Rather than talking endlessly about the supposed constructedness of gender as people like the Kunstfotze does, burning teddy bears soaked in blood to defy some oedipal urges, Clarissa in fact physically removes most of her vagina by cigarette burns and quite literally bites and cuts herself out of existence (203,

222). Similarly, while other characters are associated with filthy thoughts, sexual desires, and obscene language, Clarissa is physically filthy, her feces, urine, and used tampons populating both her and the narrator's apartment. The Kunstfotze, on the other hand, while giving herself a vulgar name and reveling in obscene sexual games, makes sure that she disinfects her intimate area with skin-friendly lotion and cleans herself fastidiously

307 'when push comes to shove, everyone in the tribe recalls the sword dances of the Old World' 308 In his 1993 article "The Clash of Civilizations?" Huntington put forth the controversial thesis that after the Cold War the "great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural" rather than mostly ideological, economic, or national, and that the "fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future" (22). He argues that there are several major civilizations in the world, such as the Islamic, Chinese, or Western civilizations, which are bound to clash with each other in part due to their different religious cultures. Huntington's essentializing view of civilizations and cultures as mostly homogenous and static entities has drawn due criticism. 309 'a foreigner... intrinsically foreign' 161 every time she uses the bathroom (65). While insane, Clarissa thus ironically seems imbued with an authenticity that the others are markedly lacking.

In the course of the text, this authenticity becomes connected to Clarissa's status as an admittedly crazy but sympathetic Christ figure. When the narrator first enters

Clarissa's apartment alone, he finds a handmade life-sized cross in her hallway but no 10 "Heiland weit und breit" (32). Throughout the text, Clarissa is portrayed as a Christ­ like figure, even though the narrator only realizes that she may indeed be the missing saviour when (or because?) it is too late. For example, the narrator equates her refusal of food with the "verlogene christliche Modell der Auszehrung" (222);311 she is said to look as if she had spent 40 days fasting, alluding to the number of days Christ spent in the desert (244); and she sacrifices her body, untouched by men, to the narrator when she mistakenly believes that it would save her lover from his sexual advances (84). Like

Samuel Richardson's title character Clarissa, Zaimoglu's Clarissa retains her innocence despite sexual intercourse. In her mind, she lives "im Stand der Gnade" and thus truly believes that she is able to speak to higher beings if she uses the bogus apparatus someone had sold her for that purpose (246).3,2 With a premonition of Clarissa's impeding death, the narrator goes to what he calls his last supper the evening before her death (239). Upon finding her dead body, he realizes that, whatever Clarissa believed when touching the strange apparatus whose electric current kills her, she truly did believe it. He therefore recognizes what happened to her as something she could truly claim as her own, it was her "Offenbarung. Ihr Geschenk. Ihr Besitz" (254).313 Like a devout

310 'no saviour as far as the eye could see' 311 'the deceitful Christian model of emaciation' 312 'in a state of grace' 313 'revelation. Her gift. Her possession.' 162

Muslim, the narrator thus takes off his shoes, stating that it does not feel right to wear shoes in the same room with Clarissa's dead body. The novel ends with the narrator kneeling shoeless in front of the apparatus, extending his arms towards it, which leaves open the possibility that he follows her by committing suicide while prostate in prayer

(254). Whereas most of his actions and thoughts throughout the text are accompanied by satirical or ironic overtones, this homage to Clarissa's body is paid in earnest. The narrator's barricading of the door from the inside as well as the ending of the text at that point ensure that his performance, like Clarissa's, is for no one's benefit.

While Clarissa is associated with Christian symbols, her language also connects her to Muslims like Ersin, when she, for example, calls the narrator "unglaubig" (246).

The significance of her character therefore lies in her ability to believe in something, be it love or otherworldly beings. Her genuineness becomes apparent on account of her ultimate refusal to join the performance of the workshop group. Significantly, her only lines would have been: "Ich will in diese Sache nicht hineingezogen werden. LaBt mich in Frieden! Ein Alptraum reicht mir!" (244).314 Unwilling to join the world of mere performance and pretence, her death ensures that her lines are actually not mere lines since she dies before ever even practicing them. Her death in turn prevents the narrator's participation in the performance. Clarissa's and the narrator's eventual turn to authenticity and prayer is celebrated to some extent, which suggests that there is redemption to be found in faith. Importantly, this is an entirely apolitical kind of faith, governed by a belief in thousands of "freundliche Wesen, die [einen] schiitzen" (230)

314 'I don't want to be dragged into your (pi.) business. Leave me alone. One nightmare is enough for me.' 163 rather than by obedience to some all-powerful and vengeful god.315 Clarissa's religion is free of the violence of jealous monotheistic Gods, whose final judgment of fire and brimstone is described in a lengthy apocalyptic passage towards the end of the novel, borrowing tone and imagery from apocalyptic texts shared by Judaism, Christianity, and

Islam, such as The Book of Daniel (246-49). While the novel hardly suggests that the world would be a better place, were everyone to go insane and believe that they are speaking to imaginary spirits, Zaimoglu does suggest that faith may be one of the last places from which one can temporarily escape or transcend a capitalist system that has co-opted all other means of subversion by commodifying them.

However, Zaimoglu also points to the fact that this counter-movement could

1]c. easily be re-territorialized by becoming a movement and being absorbed by the system.

Thus, the narrator remarks that some business-savvy individual must have made a good profit by selling Clarissa the idea that the little apparatus would allow her to contact the netherworld. Just like for Clarissa, religious belief has become the latest means for subversion for many young people in Germany's Muslim communities, who see in religion a means of claiming something of their own, "something that sets them apart from both Germany and their fathers who, in order to 'make it' in the adopted country, have bowed to its demands to conform" (Matthes 7). As Zaimoglu sarcastically points out in an interview with the Tagesschau, Islam thus has quickly been reduced to a fashion trend. It is currently "der heiBe Feger," made attractive to young people by the media's

315 'friendly beings, who protect one' 3,6 Littler observes the same tension in "Gottes Krieger." For her, the story is marked by the same latent ambiguity as Deleuze and Guattari attribute to world religions such as Islam. Religion can take a line of flight, become a war machine, and threaten the powers of the state, or it can function in the service of the state apparatus ("Profane" 14-15). 164 portrayal of Islam as dangerous (Zaimoglu, "Der Islam").317 While Zaimoglu dismisses this trend as a mere fashion in the interview, there is of course reason for concern that it is much more dangerous than that, a point that Zaimoglu picks up in his early mentioned short story "Gottes Krieger." Just as sex, art, and ethnicity have been fully appropriated by capitalism, the kind of religion adopted by these young people will soon lose its subversive potential. Obviously, Zaimoglu therefore ultimately does not suggest that

Islam will save mankind.

Nevertheless, German Amok confirms Tom Cheesman's observation, based on

Zaimoglu's other work, that in his recent texts, religious figures "are now more radical opponents of the status quo than those who obey dominant, secular, materialist conventions" (Cheesman, Novels 80). Judging from his writings for newspapers and numerous interviews, Zaimoglu himself also equates and denounces "the Enlightenment, materialism, secularism and capitalism, [and] he advocates a nonpolitical, private religiosity, and a personal ethics of social responsibility and humility" (Cheesman,

"Shakespeare" 214).318 This religiosity does not preclude sexuality or exclude others, and does not bow to an imam or pope. Importantly, both Zaimoglu's and Clarrisa's religiosity is lived privately. It is only in this way that it may be able to escape both commodification and the clash of cultures. This religiosity thus provides a hole to retreat to in a Berlin Republic in which global capitalism has subsumed sexual, artistic, and ethnic alterity.

317 Colloquial for being in fashion, 'hot stuff 318 Both Frauke Matthes and Tom Cheesman show that Zaimoglu's focus has shifted towards Islam since the early 2000s (Matthes 6). While Cheesman and others chose to largely ignore German Amok, it is clear that this shift already occurred in German Amok. 165

CHAPTER VII. Conclusion: Holes and Tangents

In this concluding chapter, I take a closer look at some themes shared by Tawada's

Pulverschrift Berlin, §enocak's Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft, Mora's Alle Tage,

Ozdamar's Seltsame Sterne, and Zaimoglu's German Amok. Specifically, I will compare the ways in which all five authors renegotiate Berlin history in order to be able to arrive in its present. Moreover, I illustrate how they all participate in moving the city and the

Berlin Republic eastward. Moving Berlin forward and eastward, the authors rescue Berlin from both global smooth and national striated space. Their works thus stay in place by digging holes into the Berlin Republic.

Moving Forward

As the previous chapters illustrate, all five authors discussed depict Berlin as a city heavy with history. However, they do so for different reasons. Tawada and §enocak, for instance, focus on a more distant past in order to undermine any claims to a unified and homogeneous German past that could be used to construct a mythical national culture.

Both Tawada's Prussian and §enocak's WWI Berlin evidence that there never has been a purely German Germany. Whereas Tawada focuses on using this fact to unsettle

Germany and Europe, §enocak is more interested in actually rebuilding both places differently. Ozdamar and Zaimoglu turn to Germany's often relegated socialist past. They emphasize what has been lost at the end of the German Democratic Republic on account of the silencing of the socialist country's critique after unification. Ozdamar revisits this recent past to highlight aspects that ought to be rescued, such as a political and ethically 166 informed East German theatre. She thereby implicitly aligns herself with one side of the discussions surrounding the role of art and history during the Literaturstreit of the 1990s.

Zaimoglu positions himself similarly by rejecting what he satirically depicts as post-

Wende Berlin's attempts at dehistoricized and meaningless art. However, rather than advocating certain aspects of the former East, Zaimoglu's work focuses on the reincarnation of the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the East German state in the shape of fundamentalist Islam. Comparing the two ideologies opens up the question of how to avert a new wall in as well as around Europe, this time one separating a Judeo-Christian capitalist West and an Islamic and Arab East. Slightly differently, Mora focuses on the very recent past to highlight that wars remain a thing of Europe's present.

As this summary of the various works' approaches to the past shows, their authors simultaneously both insert themselves into and subvert discourses surrounding German efforts at Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.319 Considering the authors' treatment of the

Holocaust and the former German Democratic Republic illustrates that the authors do not focus on mastering the past but on coming to terms with the present. Rather than wondering, as §enocak did in 1990, whether "immigrating to Germany also mean[s] immigrating to ... Germany's recent past" (Atlas 6), the texts analyzed here take this immigration for granted.320 Instead, they attend to the question of how and with what consequences this immigration to Germany takes place. As Ozdamar's and $enocak's approaches to the Holocaust illustrate, the focus ought not to be on inserting oneself into

319 Vergangenheitsbewaltigung can be translated as mastering or coming to terms with the past and generally refers to German postwar efforts to cope with Germany's Nazi past. 320 Considering §enocak's Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft, Kader Konuk also argues that "it is important for all Germans, irrespective of heritage, to find ways of participating in the country's memory culture" (232). However, as I have argued in this dissertation, §enocak in fact shows that this memory culture is intrinsically exclusive, and therefore suggests that a new memory culture needs to be created. 167

Germany's past by way of identifying or establishing analogies with Nazi victims or perpetrators. Ozdamar instead universalizes the distanced approach she employed when trying to imagine the suffering of Holocaust victims. In her writing, any Other, be he or she a victim, immigrant, or an East Berlin resident of the past, is respected for his or her unassimilable alterity. §enocak also enters Germany's and Turkey's genocidal pasts not in order to participate in Germany's canonized Betroffenheitskultur (culture of contrition) but rather to access the countries' archival pasts. Doing so, he suggests ways in which to deal with Germany's multiethnic present realities. Ozdamar's and Zaimoglu's treatment of Germany's more recent socialist past equally is not interested in evoking the past for its own sake. Rather, both Ozdamar's Brechtean aesthetics of alterity and Zaimoglu's use of socialist idiom are aimed at the present need of how to address the Other, Muslim or otherwise.

Tawada's and Mora's texts take a different approach to the theme of

Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. Tawada unearths Berlin's past in order to destabilize the

Berlin Republic of the present. However, whereas the four other authors address the

Holocaust in some way or another, Tawada completely eclipses Nazi Germany and the

Holocaust.321 Her cast in Pulverschrift Berlin includes figures from the 18th, 19th, and late 20th century but none that reference WWII. There is no evidence to suggest that

Tawada's silence on the topic marks the Holocaust as some kind of aporia. Rather, her move emphatically stresses that there are other German pasts that need to be addressed.

That is, Tawada's work suggests that Germany's preoccupation with its WWII past is too limited. Her efforts to recover, for example, Germany's colonial past merits mention in

321 Zaimoglu explicitly plays with Nazi language and imagery and Mora repeatedly alludes to the Holocaust in her treatment of genocide. 168 this context. Written in Japanese, her short story "The Shadow Man" for example tells the story of the historical figure of Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Amo (1703- c.1759), a former

Ghanaian raised and educated in Germany. In this story, Tawada adresses themes such as

Afro-Germans, assimilation, hybridity, racism, and Germany's involvement in European colonial enterprises.322 While less explicitly, Tawada also points to Germany's and

Europe's complex histories of colonization in Pulverschrift Berlin. She suggests that the issues raised by previous practices, such as the transportation and translation of Prussian values to Japan, are relevant to post-Wende Germany's and Europe's expansion to the

East.323 Mora's Alle Tage side-steps any explicit references to WWII, the Holocaust, and reunification for similar reasons. She depicts the Berlin Republic as a country preoccupied with questions of self-definition. Focusing on how to leave WWII and the

Cold War behind, the Berlin Republic thus (mis)used the uncanny familiarity of the

Bosnian genocide and the wars in order to move itself into a post-postwar era. Like

Tawada as well as §enocak, Mora cautions against Germany's self-centered preoccupation with its own past to the detriment of its Others.

Despite their respective differences, all five authors stress the importance of engaging in Germany's past not for the sake of the past but in order to enable coping with the present. That is, they mobilize the past in order to address realities such as the multiethnic, multireligious, or European dimensions of present-day Berlin. Drawing on histories such as, for example, Turkish-German Ankara, the authors thus outline paths for

322 Amo was kidnapped from Ghana as a child, brought to the Netherlands on a slave ship, and given as a present to a Prussian noble man, who encouraged Amo's education. At the University of Halle, Amo eventually became the first Afro-German professor in Germany. For more information on Amo, see Abraham. 323 Regarding Afro-German history, one should also mention the Berlin Afro-German poet and political activist May Ayim (1960-96). For illuminating work on Ayim, other Afro-German writers, as well as post-colonial theory in Germany, see for example Wright, Michaels, and Ha. 169 immigrants' arrival in Germany's present. More importantly, they also offer models that could show the Berlin Republic itself ways by which to arrive in its own present.

Mobilizing the past, then, the authors effectively move Germany into a future more congenial to Others' arrival. Unlike the futuristic and international Sony Center at

Potsdamer Platz that could have been built in almost any major modern city, however, their future Berlin remains anchored in Germany. Their Berlin is neither petrified in the past nor able to shed the weight of history, since neither would allow for the settlement of breathing and embodied beings.

Comparing the texts' approaches to Germany's formative historical events of the

20th century reveals that the Holocaust continues to command writers' attention - whether this attention is given or, as is the case with Tawada, explicitly refused. One can also observe that the writers increasingly pay attention to other 20th-century genocides.

§enocak, for instance, pays considerable attention to the Armenian genocide, and

Zaimoglu references it by means of the prostitute Rosa. Also, whereas Ozdamar's protagonist simply drives through the territories of former Yugoslavia in her Berlin-

Istanbul trilogy, the wars and their atrocities, such as mass-rape, are thematized in her latest drama Perikizi: Ein Traumspiel (2010),324 in which Ozdamar joins Mora in making the Bosnian genocide more visible to the Berlin Republic. In Perikizi, Ozdamar also develops an earlier reference to the Armenian genocide, that is, the narrator's grandmother's recurring dream of two Armenian brides' suicides in Selfsame Sterne

(227). In Perikizi the two Armenian brides accompany the protagonist on her journey from Istanbul to Berlin. Silent ghosts for most of the play, the Armenian brides

324 Perikizi was commissioned by Ruhr, the European Capital of Culture 2010, for a series of plays published as Theater, Theater: Odyssee Europa. 170 eventually speak: "Wir diirfen nicht. Wir diirfen nicht sprechen. Schon ewig lange diirfen wir nicht sprechen" (312).325 Like Senocak, they thus break with a silence that has reigned for the greater part of the past century.

In Germany, this silence has also been broken in popular media. For instance, the

NDR documentary Aghet - Ein Volkermord by Eric Friedler first aired in April 2010. It uses archival material and well-known German actors who read excerpts from eye witness accounts, to familiarize the German audience with the Armenian genocide. Films like Aghet, Ozdamar's recent play, or Giinter Grass' appeal, made in Istanbul in April

2010, to Turkey to acknowledge the genocide, all indicate a growing awareness of the

Armenian genocide both in Germany and more globally. It remains to be seen whether or not this marked increase of interest in the history of the Armenian genocide and the demands that Turkey publicly recognize it, merely serve to add to the list of pretexts under which to indefinitely delay Turkey's accession to the European Union.326 Be that as it may, Zaimoglu's, §enocak's, Mora's, and Ozdamar's works all remind Europe of the fact that even its recent 20th-century history is not nearly as democratic, enlightened, or postwar as it would like to portray itself.

Moving East

The authors discussed in this dissertation also converge on depicting Berlin's figural

325 'We must not. We must not speak. For an eternity we have not been allowed to speak.' 326 In Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft, Marie functions as a mouthpiece for those arguing that Turkey's unwillingness to acknowledge the genocide is merely another reason why the country is not yet ready to join the EU (16). She thus lumps together Talat Pascha, the genocide, the presumed Muslim oppression of women, and torture to convey to Sascha that the Turks are not yet ready to be Europeans. 171 move to the East.327 By means of her Prussian Japan and Japanese Berlin, Tawada dislocates Berlin, Germany, and Europe beyond Europe. This move undermines any notion that there is such as thing as a territorially and culturally fixed Europe that could not possibly accommodate any Other. Conceiving of Europe as a malleable space, on the other hand, allows for change. Even if there presently were something resembling a

European Leitkultur, Tawada's work shows that this culture has been and continues to be in constant flux and therefore is intrinsically not an exclusionary concept. Mora and

Senocak also look East by turning their attention to what are perceived as the margins of

Europe. By moving those supposed margins into the middle of Berlin, they undermine the very concepts of center and periphery. Because the wars in former Yugoslavia have served as the Berlin Republic's mirror, according to which Germany has styled itself as beyond its own postwar era, the Balkans actually are part of that new Germany. Put differently, Mora reveals that the new Republic's image is in part built out of the rubble of the Balkans, making the latter part of present-day Germany. Rather than coming from an outside, the issues surrounding the Yugoslavian wars therefore are a part of Europe, providing a platform from which to renew an inner-European self-critique. The wars remind Europe of the fact that no constructed 'pan'-identity, be it pan-Yugoslavian, pan-

Germanic, or pan-European, can simply pass over ethnic, religious, or other differences.

As the fate of former Yugoslavia shows, if ignored, these differences may just reassert themselves with a vengeance.

§enocak imports the south-easternmost part of Europe, Turkey, to Berlin. Rather

327 Berlin's move to the East is also evidenced by Wladimir Kaminer's popular humorous writings such as Russendisko (2000) and Schdnhauser Allee (2001). Kaminer, a secular Russian Jew who came to East Berlin in 1990, thematizes the influx of Russians and Russian Jews to Berlin during the 1990s. 172 than serving as a warning, the elements of Turkish-German history that he emphasizes serve as a positive example. As a result, his work escapes predominantly negative discourses about Turkey's potential accession to the European Union. Instead of an emphasis on potential cultural or religious conflicts that could arise due to Turkey's accession, §enocak points out that historically, such a union is not as unlikely as some assume today. More importantly, his novel suggests that rather than constituting a problem for Europe, Turkey's accession could contribute to solve Germany's and

Europe's already existing challenges. For instance, Turkey's history and present can provide examples of how to address potential tensions between Islam and dominantly secular states.

Looking back at the former German Democratic Republic, Zaimoglu and

Ozdamar also turn eastward. Like $enocak, Ozdamar does so for a source of guidance.

She implies that something has been lost when the former East was simply absorbed by the West. According to Ozdamar's logic, had the Federal Republic and former East

Germany kept a reflective, Brechtean distance from each other after the Wende, they perhaps would have been able to critically look at themselves and each other. Thus, the two parts of the country could have grown together by means of mutually inspired change rather than the East's annexation. Also emphasizing that, for better or worse, the former

German Democratic Republic's history is an integral part of Germany's past, Zaimoglu's text suggests that the former East of the Cold War may be closer to the new East emerging from the 'war on terrorism' than one might think. Despite rejecting their fundamentalist and military embodiments, Zaimoglu does not simply dismiss socialist and Muslim critiques of Europe. Instead, taking aspects of their criticism seriously entails 173 acknowledging that there is a spiritual vacuum in the midst of commodification.

Zaimoglu's text includes the warning that catapulting cities such as Berlin into global smooth space leaves an empty place just waiting to be occupied by new tribalisms. Since even Zaimoglu's East, which consists primarily of the State of Brandenburg, does not offer any solutions and fails to re-anchor Berlin, the only holey space possible for him is

that of the holy.

All of the authors I have discussed in this project move Berlin eastward while

simultaneously anchoring it in Germany. It has become obvious that Berlin is Japanese,

Turkish, and Balkan precisely because of its German history. Looking at the past differently reveals that the German capital always also has been an Eastern city and thus ought to be able to welcome its eastern futures.

In the context of these Berlin texts' move to the East, it is also notable that

besides Mora, Ozdamar and Tawada also are paying increasing attention to the Balkans

in particular. As mentioned above, in Ozdamar's most recent writing, Yugoslavia is no

longer merely a site of transit or a no-man's land somewhere between Istanbul and

Berlin. While the train drives through the war-torn territories of former Yugoslavia,

Perikizi's protagonist for example debates a Serbian mosquito's fate. One of Perikizi's

travel companions wonders if, upon drinking the blood of a Croatian, the mosquito would

become "ein von Europa offiziell anerkannter Moskito" (293).328 In Sonderzeichen

Europa, Tawada describes a New York City supermarket called 'Europa-Supermarkt.'

Whereas the store offers only one or two items from countries such as Switzerland,

Sweden, or Germany, there is an abundance of products from the Balkans. Therefore, the

narrator concludes that the Balkans are the "Mittelpunkt" of Europe and, since the word

328 'a mosquito that is officially recognized by Europe' 174

'Balkan' explodes the European Union's border, "stellt der Laden seine eigene Identitat in Frage" (Sonderzeichen Europa 28).329

To a greater or lesser degree, Tawada, Ozdamar, and Mora thus join the company of those German writers who have started publicly to question the role of German intellectuals in regards to the wars in former Yugoslavia and the Balkans more generally.

Next to the aforementioned Walser debate, the controversy surrounding Peter Handke's defence of Serbia was one of the most significant literary media-events of the 1990s. As

Previsic points out, German writers of all calibers continue to adress this issue, including

Hans Magnus Enzenberger in Aussichten aufden Biirgerkrieg (1992), Sabine Riedel in

Portraits am Ende der Ausgangssperre: Sarajevo nach dem Krieg (1997), Norbert

Gstrein in Das Handwerk des Totens (2003), Juli Zeh in Die Stille ist ein Gerausch: Eine

Fahrt durch Bosnien (2002), or Oliver Keune in Ein sanfter Strahl von Licht (2009).330

Even though these writers, just like Tawada, Mora, and Ozdamar, ought to be applauded for at least acknowledging the wars as a defining event for post-Cold War Germany and

Europe, the question arises whether they merely continue the German tradition of

Balkanism. Previsic rightly takes issue with the fact that all of these authors can offer only second-hand accounts of the wars ("Poetik" 191). Voices like Handke's, for example, presume to speak for the Bosnians. Thematizing the Balkans in its relevance to

Europe, be it as source of warning or a force to explode Europe's borders, runs the danger of reducing the Balkans once more to being Germany's and Europe's projection screen.

329 'center', 'the store calls its own identity in question' 330 See Previsic "Eine Frage". An anthology of German-language fiction by young Bosnians Ein Hund lauft durch die Republik: Geschichten aus Bosnien (2004) edited by Juli Zeh, and Sasa Stanisic's Wie derSlodat das Grammofon repariert (2006) are promising beginnings of a German-Yugoslavian literature regarding the war. 175

The problem of how to invoke the East haunts each of the texts discussed in this

dissertation. Europe's inglorious history of Orientalism and Balkanism burdens all

German attempts to depict the Balkans and Turkey. Yet, as this dissertation suggests,

German writers who possess an additional heritage considered as part of this East may be

better suited as guides in how to avoid reorientalization and rebalkanization. As writers

who are decentred and continuously decentre Europe, they are less likely to speak for the

center.

Staying in Place

At this point, I would like to return to the question posed at the beginning of this

dissertation, that is, if and how the authors in question are able to bore holes into

contemporary European space, keep the mines open, and make a place of their own in

post-Wende Berlin. As I have argued, Tawada does so by means of deciphering signs in

the Berlin landscape. Exploring the spaces around Ogai's memorial sites and Queen

Luise's statue, Tawada recalls an often neglected aspect of Berlin's past, that is, its 19th-

century global connectedness. She thereby emphasizes that Prussian Berlin, which those

yearning for a pre-National Socialist German nationalism turn to, was itself not as unified

and homogenous as revisionists may want to believe. Put differently, Tawada makes the

case that there never has been such a thing as a pure and unified German culture to begin

with. However, this undermining of culture, be it the Prussian, Japanese, German, or

European one, does not lead Tawada to reject culture wholesale as a dispensable construct. Rather, Tawada embeds and positions herself solidly within Germany's history and culture, traces of which permeate Berlin, in order to show that the Berlin Republic 176 can be built on a German history without thereby falling into discourses of nationalism.

That is, by dislocating Berlin and Europe in a global context, Tawada in fact also relocates it. She merely opens up the tunnels by which Berlin is connected to the past and the rest of the world in order to ensure that its present remains open.

Zafer §enocak's Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft operates quite similarly. Instead of turning to Japanese-Prussian history, §enocak draws on the historical archives of a

Turkish-German history surrounding the Armenian genocide. This provides him with a platform from which to criticize post-Wende Holocaust commemorations. For §enocak,

Germany's culture of Betroffenheit leads to a monumentalization of memory that actually deadens rather than enables remembrance. Moreover, reunified Germany merely uses this memory discourse in order to striate itself by means of a homogenizing preoccupation with national self-definition. Refusing to participate in a process of building a monumental identity based on collective guilt and victimhood, §enocak instead opts to attenuate Berlin's foundations by means of invoking aspects of the Turkish past of the

German-German present. He thereby also rebuilds more flexible foundations on which to construct the Berlin Republic in such a way as to leave breathing holes for the Other.

Also looking for Europe in places defined as non-European, Terezia Mora's novel highlights how the Balkan wars of the 1990s are constitutive of today's Berlin Republic.

While the Balkans, like the Far East and Turkey, continue to serve as Germany's and

Europe's implicit Other, Mora reveals that this Other is in the very midst of Europe. She thus undermines any claims that the Berlin Republic has left the issues of WWII and post-war Germany behind. As former Yugoslavia has illustrated, nationalism continues to rear its ugly head in Europe. For Yugoslavian war refugees, then, arrival is prevented by 177 the Berlin Republic's efforts to distance itself from everything Bosnia represents to a

Europe bent on materializing the end of history. As wars and forced dislocation illustrate, however, history still takes place, leaving scars on people and their bodies. The end of

Mora's novel somewhat pessimistically suggests that until the Berlin Republic makes room for these historical and embodied human beings by reconsidering its own history their only refuge will lie in violent forgetting.

While Tawada, §enocak, and Mora focus on those considered outside of Europe,

Ozdamar and Zaimoglu highlight Germany's internal Other, that is, the former German

Democratic Republic. Ozdamar offers the Other a holey space in the form of a subject position which keeps a distance. Without indulging in a naive Ostalgie, she highlights the critical artistic impulses that originated from the East Berlin Volksbuhne, which rendered

East Berlin a welcome alternative from an Istanbul and West Germany caught up in violent but ultimately empty ideological struggles. Instead of dismissing East German art, like some voices during the Literaturstreit did, and rather than participating in the contemporary fascination with the Deutscher Herbst, Ozdamar recovers the pre- reunification Volksbuhne''% Brechtean theater in order to develop an aesthetics that allows for the non-identificatory acceptance of ethnic, ideological, temporal, and spatial alterity.331 Rather than leading to an inevitable homogenization, a German-German future that takes the culture of former East Germany seriously can become a safe haven in which to stay. Ozdamar's writing therefore is situated in Berlin not despite but because of continually renewing its commitment to stay at a distance.

331 This fascination with the Deutscher Herbst is perhaps best evidenced by more the more than fifteen documentaries and feature films that have been released on the subject between 2000 and 2008. 178

Zaimoglu's German Amok instead alludes to the former German Democratic

Republic in order to draw attention to the void left after the end of the Cold War. As pessimistic as Mora, Zaimoglu suggests that the Berlin Republic of the present is hopelessly lost in the smooth space of global capitalism. His Berlin could in fact be any global city were it not for the fact that its immediate surroundings, the former East

German states, remind it of the socialist critiques of its capitalist present. However, this critique reveals itself to be as impotent as that which has replaced it, that is, a fundamentalist Muslim critique of a supposedly decadent, capitalist Europe. Since both socialism and fundamentalist Islam eventually turn out also to lend themselves to commodification rather than subversion, Zaimoglu locates the last refuge from a capitalized smooth space in a privately lived religiosity. However, like Mora's holey space, Zaimoglu's is merely temporary. In fact, it is rather a line of flight poised to self- destruct like Clarissa. While Tawada's, §enocak's, and Ozdamar's writings dig a place in a holey Berlin that can be continually renewed and thus provides an actual alternative,

Mora's and Zaimoglu's works merely offer a glimpse of spaces not holey enough to escape either re-smoothing or re-striation.

Nevertheless, as I have argued in this dissertation, none of the authors under consideration depict Berlin as interchangeable with any other industrialized global city.

For all of them, Berlin's specific history, sites, surroundings, and most importantly, challenges, matter for the city's and its inhabitants' present and future. All authors therefore are deeply engaged in specifically German discourses. Thematizing general issues such as identity, immigration, alterity, and the interdependence of global and local forces, their works certainly partake in a discussion of themes central to literature from 179 around the world. Paying attention to concerns such as a European Leitkultur, Islam, the

Balkans, and Turkey, the works also share much in common with other European literatures. However, the authors I have chosen illustrate that such participation in post- national contexts does not preclude participation in the national one. On the contrary, it is precisely in and from the confines of a Berlin with all its specifically German history, weight, and challenges, that holey spaces can emerge to keep this European city open to its Others. 180

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CURRICULUM VITA

Name: Maria Mayr

Post-secondary University of Toronto Education and Toronto, Ontario, Canada Degrees: 1999-2003 Honours B.A., Philosophy and Religion

The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada 2003-2005 M.A., Comparative Literature Bridging Borders in Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's Die Brucke vom Goldenen Horn and Lee Maracle's Ravensong

The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada 2005-2010 Ph.D., Comparative Literature

Selected Honours Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) And Awards: Canada Graduate Scholarship (Doctoral) 2006-2009

Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Ontario Graduate Scholarship 2006-2007 (declined), 2005-2006, 2003-2004

Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Master's Scholarship 2004-2005 208

Publications: Mayr, Maria. "Pulverschrift Berlin im lochrigen Europa." Etudes Germaniques (2010, forthcoming).

Mayr, Maria. "Among and Between: Alterity in Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's Die Brticke vom Goldenen Horn." Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe. Ed. Mirjam Gebauer and Pia Schwarz Lausten. Miinchen: Martin Meidenbauer, 2010. 319-32.

Work Experience: The University of Western Ontario Instructor (German and Comparative Literature), 2003-07, 2009-10 Teaching Assistant (Comparative Literature), 2007, 2008