Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture by Maria Stehle (review)

Maria Stehle opens her Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture with a quote from Feridun Zaimoglu’s 1998 book Koppstoff, in which ghetto is described not as a space of seclusion, in which certain groups are rendered unseen, but rather as a stage upon which a “multicultural Bohemian fantasy” (1) plays out in the German imagination. As Stehle quickly notes, the ghetto has featured prominently in discourses around multiculturalism and immigration over the past several decades as a site of contention and contingency. In portrayals ranging from the overtly political to the literary, the ghetto stands in contrast with the more glamorous, cosmopolitan parts of cityscapes as a site of danger, poverty, and crime—abject and yet somewhat alluring. Stehle argues that since the 1990s, the ghetto has evolved into a key metaphor for shifting social and political realities brought about through the convergence of Germany’s delayed acceptance of its status as a country of immigration, the end of the Cold War and German reunification, and the developments of the European Union.

Drawing from cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the “mediascape,” space is a central analytical concept in all three studies that constitute Stehle’s book, as she introduces it in the opening chapter of the book. Stehle is interested in the physical space of the ghetto as it is constructed through the media and in the more figurative spaces of cultural production and circulation, from which certain people can be marginalized. In the latter sense, Stehle cites arguments made by cultural theorists who claim that internet technologies have enabled people to stay in closer contact with immigrant communities as well as their countries of origin. This allegedly results in what are described as informational parallel societies (Parallelgesellschaften). Stehle attempts to reframe the problem by asking whether “the reaction against the influence of Turkish media in Germany [could] be understood as an attempt to define the boundaries of a national information ghetto” (16). The spatial metaphor thus becomes a means of theorizing access to particular forms of “symbolic capital,” and by extension the interpellation of authors such as Zaimoglu as “niche authors” might be viewed as yet another form of ghettoization within fields of German literary production, and the ghetto becomes a literary site par excellence for various performances of gender, ethnicity, and nationality.

The body of Stehle’s book is comprised of three case studies that each correspond to a chapter and explore ghettoized spaces across a different medium—in her terminology, textscapes, filmscapes, and soundscapes respectively. While the latter two chapters are more comprehensive, the scope in the first of these studies is limited to Feridun Zaimoglu’s early works: the two collections of literarily transcribed protocols Kanak Sprak (1995), Koppstoff (1999), and to a lesser extent the novel Abschaum (1997). The use of Zaimoglu’s texts alone to represent ghettoized textscapes is one potential weakness of the book; however, this is also the chapter in which Stehle takes the second concept in her title, voice, most seriously. Using Judith Butler’s concept of citationality, Stehle reads the collective voices in Zaimoglu’s early works as resignifying familiar forms of socially sanctioned minority speech such as the cultural mediator or native informant and translocal identities associated with Black urban identity in the U.S. The ambiguity fostered by Zaimoglu in the introductions to these two works, which leaves uncertain the extent to which Kanak Sprak and Koppstoff represent transcribed speech or stylized speech, heightens the performative effect, revealing their voices to be “pre-scripted roles for the Other” (42). Pointing to a tension that has often been mentioned in discussions of Zaimoglu’s early works, Stehle notes that this ambiguity has enabled seemingly irreconcilable readings of Kanak Sprak as politically transgressive on one hand and as a reification of stigmas of violent foreign youths on the other hand. Stehle’s analysis of Koppstoff focuses on how the Kanak identity cultivated in Zaimoglu’s first two works...