Narrative Orientierungslosigkeit and New Orientations in Saliha Scheinhardt's Die Stadt und das Mädchen

Saliha Scheinhardt, "the first Turkish migrant woman to write directly in German" (Fischer and McGowan 12), has achieved significant commercial success (Veteto-Conrad, "Doppelte Nationalitätsmoral" 1) and modest critical attention (Hazlett 17). She won the Offenbach Literature Prize in 1985, the Alfred Müller Felsenburg Prize in 1993, and the honour, in 1987, of an appointment as Stadtschreiberin of Offenburg. Despite these achievements, Scheinhardt has been of limited interest to academics. The little analysis that exists of Scheinhardt dates primarily from the late 1980s and early 1990s and is devoted to her earlier work. Moreover, this criticism reflects positions from which its authors and the analysis of Turkish-German literature have moved on, for Turkish-German studies is a rapidly changing field. Like Turkish-German literature and the academic criticism of it, Scheinhardt's writing has taken new directions as well. The following analysis will suggest that Saliha Scheinhardt's Die Stadt und das Mädchen (1993), which has not claimed much influence or scholarly attention, nevertheless warrants investigation and that the existing view of Scheinhardt – grounded primarily in her earlier work – should be positively revised so as to see the novel as reflecting some of the broader changes and concerns in Turkish-German writing present in what Leslie Adelson has referred to as "the transitional decade of the 1990s" (The Turkish Turn 13).

Scheinhardt's 1993 novel goes beyond some of the problematic features of her earlier work, criticized for its simplistic representations of Turkish women as victims, in order to suggest that there are complex connections between narrative, power, gender, and travel that are difficult to address in literature that attempts to depict accurately the lives of Turkish Germans. In doing so, Die Stadt und das Mädchen touches on concerns that have emerged as central themes in Turkish-German writing and manifests these concerns on a formal level as well. In the sense that it broaches themes and styles developed more radically by others, yet does not break radically with writing of the 1980s, her 1993 novel can be seen as a transitional work of Turkish German literature.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Scheinhardt attracted a mixed response from some academics, who questioned the political efficacy of her texts. In 1989, Heidrun Suhr validated the "strong impression" left by and the "accura[cy]" of Scheinhardt's early work, particularly Frauen, die sterben, ohne daß sie gelebt hätten (1983) and Drei Zypressen (1984). But she questioned the effectiveness of the texts' "emancipatory appeal," given that the "undifferentiated one-sided-ness may act more to increase prejudice than to improve the situation" (94), specifically because of Scheinhardt's depiction of Turkish women's victimization at the hands of violent Turkish men. With few exceptions (Henderson 234–37), such treatment as we see by Suhr, Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan (13), Marilya Veteto-Conrad (Finding a Voice 65–71; "Doppelte Nationalitätsmoral" 6, 11, 15, 21), Sheila Johnson (154–55), and Karin Yeşilada ("Die geschundene Suleika," 99–103; "Literatur statt Tränen!" 151–54) is typical of academic criti-cism of Scheinhardt (Hazlett 83–87).

The criticisms of Scheinhardt seem to be a function both of the kinds of questions being asked in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s that focussed on authenticity, political effect, and "sociological positivism" (Adelson, "Against Between" 132) even when they praise Scheinhardt (Hazlett 83–87) and of an emphasis on her earlier works, which do make claims to sociological authent-icity (for example, Frauen, die Sterben 9). In fact, the emphasis on her early writing is so pervasive that a 1999 bibliography of Turkish women authors writing in German includes nothing published by her after 1992 (Öztürk 266). Yet negative assessments are based only in part on her early writings, for her failings continue to be seen as both aesthetic and political. For example, in a 1999 polemic, Karin Yeşilada criticizes both Scheinhardt's lack of literary sophisti-cation and the emphasis on victimhood in her early works, which Yeşilada claims influenced the image of Turkish...