The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature. Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration

Over the past decade or so, there has been a palpable change in discussions of Turkish-German literature. While questions of classification of this important body of literature, its position vis-à-vis the German canon, and evaluations of ethnic identitarian politics as manifested in literature itself were central to discussions until the mid-1990s, the focus of scholarship has slowly shifted. Recent studies, such as Kader Konuk's Identitäten im Prozeß (2001) and Azade Seyhan's Writing Outside the Nation (2001) have evaluated Turkish-German writings by situating them in the larger corpus of transnational literatures, discussing thereby the intersections, confluences, and contradictions that form and inform cultural exchanges between Germany and Turkey as part of mass migrations and globalization in the latter half of the 20^th century.

Leslie Adelson has been at the forefront of this change. Since her spirited debate with Ülker Gökberk on their readings of Sten Nadolny's novel Selim oder die Gabe der Rede (1990) in the mid-1990s, Adelson has pushed the field, emphasizing the necessity of discussing Turkish-German literature within the larger corpus of German literature, stressing the critical examination of identity, ethnicity, gender, and class. Her latest book-length study, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature documents some of her previously published essays, extensively reworked and expanded.

The book starts with a pertinent provocation: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, don't you damn well think it had better be a duck?" (1). The "duck" refers to literary works by contemporary German authors that register aspects of Turkish migration into Germany, a duck that, Adelson argues, has hitherto been made to fit into a number of categories such as minority literature, ethnic literature, literature of migration, transnational literature, and specifically in Germany, intercultural literature. She pursues this provocation in two steps. First, in order to release the Turkish character in the literary narrative from its role as a representative figure of the larger Turkish community, Adelson carefully scrutinizes the concept of referentiality, "a conjoined effect of literary figuration and narrative development" (17). Secondly, to prevent the evacuation of Turkish and German references, Adelson focuses on "reconfigurations of the German national archive [rather than] the Turkish national archive, transnational literatures with an 'accent' [. . .] or even postcolonial difference" (12). Her attempts to illustrate the inadequacies of models that only emphasize "self-evident" differences, unassimilabilities, and strangeness then culminates in her elaborate critique of the two-worlds theory of interculturality (23–26).

Stressing the necessity to develop a "new critical grammar of migration," one that innovatively re-imagines the location of Turkish-German writings within German literature, Adelson chooses the phrase "literature of Turkish migration" to think through the position of the "Turk"; the "riddle of referentiality" (17) offered by the figure of the Turk in what has come to be known as Turkish-German literature. "What are the figures in reference to which literary tales of migration are told?" Adelson asks, "By what means are these figures constituted?" (17).

With these questions at the core of her study, Adelson pursues her provocation throughout the book, specifically demonstrating the inadequacies of theoretical frameworks offered by interculturalism for reading literary works of migration. She identifies interculturality as a "rhetorical conceit" that places Turkish migrants on a "bridge between the two worlds," arguing that "it signals both a German world embedded in a European world and a Turkish world with its proper place outside of Europe" (6). The rhetorical conceit, Adelson argues, acquires the form of a "cultural fable" (20). Positioning her analytical and critical agenda beyond the "historical obsolence" (20) of this conceit, Adelson diagnoses a "broader Turkish turn [that] began to acquire critical mass in German-language fiction in the 1990s [. . .]" (15). As an inquiry into this "Turkish turn," Adelson introduces a heuristic device, "the concept of touching tales as an alternative organizing principle for considering 'Turkish' lines of thought" (20, original emphasis).

The three chapters following the Introduction identify and discuss the "touching tales" in works of authors such as Sten Nadolny, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zafer S¸enocak, Aras Ören, and Feridun Zaimoglu. Adelson attempts to accord the coming together of Germans and Turks through discussions of "Dialogue and Storytelling" (Chapter 1), "Genocide and Taboo" (Chapter 2), and "Ethnicity and Labor" (Chapter 3). Each chapter carries the premise of the promise that Adelson makes in her Introduction, which is to bring together "affective dimensions [. . .] which in varying configurations reflect[s] German guilt, shame, or resentment about the Nazi past, German fears of migration, Turkish fears of victimization, national taboos in both countries, and Turkish perceptions of German fantasies" (20).

The accomplishment of Adelson's book—which is in fact a rich document of her research in Turkish-German literature over the past decade and a half—lies not merely in its departure from extant scholarship, and its proposition of "literature of Turkish migration" as the new conduit for Turkish-German literature. Adelson's wide-ranging theoretical considerations that frame her literary readings include engagements with Arjun Appadurai's reflections on modernity, Seyla Benhabib's conjectures of cultural difference, Rey Chow's elaborations on the "protestant ethnic," and Andreas Huyssen's succinct discussion of diasporic memory, to name only a few. Through her engagement with the works of these scholars, Adelson convincingly argues for a reconsideration of works by Turkish-German authors beyond assertions of singular or multiple cultural identities. In addition, through her discussions of aesthetic theories ranging from those of Brodsky Lacour to Julia Kristeva, Adelson successfully combines political and aesthetic analyses of literary works in general, and Turkish-German works in specific. She offers aesthetic strategies to measure the space, stature, and situation of minorities and their writings, without losing sight of important political questions of agency, authority, and affiliation. That stated, where I see the real achievement of this work is not just in its offering of an alternative model for Turkish-German Studies. Through a sustained vigilance towards an ethnicized aesthetics and gendered politics, Adelson has managed to imagine the new critical grammar of migration, offering thereby new directions for future studies of literatures that engage with migration and ethnic minorities.