Beyond the Mother Tongue. The Postmonolingual Condition by Yasemin Yildiz (review)

At the latest since the publication of the Germany in Transit source book (Anton Kaes, Denis Göktürk, and David Gramling, eds., Germany in Transit. Nation and Migration 1955–2005, 2007), there has been no question that multilingual literature has joined the canon of German literature. Yasemin Yildiz in her recent study, awarded the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, posits that even as literary multilingualism has gained attention in German studies scholarship in the last two decades, “monolingualism” has continued to dominate an entire reading paradigm. This assumption of inherent links among native language, ethnicity, culture, nation, affect, and identity continues to marginalize multilingual practices such as writing in non-native languages, writing in multiple languages, or integrating “foreign” languages into German texts. A construct of eighteenth-century movements for language purity and nation-building, monolingualism derives its seemingly organic nature from a “linguistic family romance” and the “naturalizing, genealogical kinship metaphor of ‘mother tongue’ ” (135). The narrative of the “complex imbrication of the mother’s body with language and male authority” (11), which has seen multiple iterations from Julia Kristeva to Rosi Braidotti to Friedrich Kittler, becomes for Yildiz the affectively charged force that propagates the mythos of natural linkage between “one predetermined and socially sanctioned language” (13), origin, and culture.

Yildiz’s focus on the monolingual paradigm reveals affiliations between the modern canon (Kafka and Adorno) and the contemporary canon of immigrant, migrant, and transnational works (Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu). Yildiz traces how each author in her study uses formal textual strategies to reimagine the “identitarian force of language” (6) and thus take part in the ongoing liberatory struggle towards a “postmonolingual” paradigm “in which language and ethnicity may be fully delinked” (201). This postmonolingual paradigm in turn carries with it new affects, multiple modes of belonging, and more flexible gender relations. She all the while recognizes that this paradigm is still in the process of becoming and posits that such a paradigm shift would demand no less than a “fundamental reconceptualization of European and European-inflected thinking about language, identity, and modernity” (2). In each of Yildiz’s readings, foreign language is not an oppressive force but, for instance, a carrier of refreshing foreign elements, a “new space for creativity and freedom” (132), a “gateway to liberation” (205), or “the means of working through trauma” (205). Each of the book’s five chapters addresses a particular relation to language, the mother tongue, and multilingualism, and the chapters are organized to reflect a progressive movement away from the monolingual.

The opening analysis of Kafka posits that, in encountering Yiddish and reading about Yiddish in French, Kafka, who as a German Jew in Prague lacked a “socially sanctioned mother tongue” (26), experiences a productive defamiliarized uncanniness with relation to his native German. Though Kafka continues to work within the monolingual paradigm, his writings demonstrate the outlines of a paradigm shift. This chapter is followed by a particularly attentive close reading of Fremdwörter in Adorno’s “Über den Gebrauch von Fremdwörtern,” written, significantly, before Adorno’s exile, and “Wörter aus der Fremde” (1959). In Adorno, the Fremdwort, which always already evidences “internal multilingualism” (26) and implicitly questions a mother tongue’s purity, is used in juxtaposition to Germanic words to suggest a particular “interrelationship between alienation and foreignness” (86). Moreover, it is the Fremdwort’s ability to shock and remind the speaker of the German language’s past within the same text that allows German to remain a usable language after the Holocaust. Yildiz concludes with the provocative suggestion that all of Adorno’s texts “can be read through the lens of the configuration of foreign-derived, foreign, and native words” (107), opening doors to further research on Adorno, language, and national identity.

The remaining three chapters are dedicated to “deliberate bilingual writing” (108) in Yoko Tawada’s work, literal...