“Ich bin ein Humanistenkopf”: Feridun Zaimoglu, German Literature, and Worldness

In an article published in Die Zeit in the autumn of 2011 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of mass Turkish immigration to Germany, German-Turkish writer Feridun Zaimoglu¹ posed the rhetorical question, “Ist das [Zaimoglu’s] das Gesicht eines Sonnyboys [that is, a kind, friendly, and pleasing young man, a public persona to which Zaimoglu has never aspired, especially not in his early writing]?”² He answers with an intertextual reference, or unreferenced quotation, to his own 1995 debut, Kanak Sprak: “Den Kanaken kannst du nimmer aus der Fresse wischen” (Topçu and Ulrich). Significantly, the article is entitled “So wütend wie er könnt ihr gar nicht sein.” The titular “anger” deliberately reminds the reader of the controversial position Zaimoglu held at the beginning of his career. However, it no longer corresponds to the author’s current public persona as a “mellow” German writer who happens to have Turkish parents. He has become, in his own words, a “Fremddeutsche[r]” (Cheesman and Yeşilada, “‘Ich bin nicht modern’” 60).

This example from the media coverage of a German author with a migrant background is telling as it reveals how rather limited notions of authorship and categorization linger on in the public consciousness of the German literary market. Yet Zaimoglu’s rhetorical question and answer quoted above are also proof of his complicity when it comes to employing established images to market himself and his work, to make use of what Rebecca Braun refers to as “the power of the myth” in constructions of authorship. Zaimoglu therefore serves as a particularly interesting case study when discussing world authorship and German literature: as a writer who was born in Turkey in 1964 but came to Germany as a very young child, he seems to personify the tensions that arise as the post-migrant writer attempts to move consciously from the margins of the German literary market to its centre.

Particularly in his more recent work, Zaimoglu himself has tried to follow this trajectory, to explore and find a place in a transnational literary context by playing with his Turkish, German, and now increasingly European cultural roots. To understand Zaimoglu’s shifting positioning as an author, I draw on two seemingly opposing perceptions of “world literature” and “worldliness,” developed by David Damrosch and Edward Said respectively. Although for both critics “worldness” is a primarily textual issue, their thoughts will help me show Zaimoglu’s active engagement in the representation of his texts and his conscious circulatory role in the construction of his authorship.

In What Is World Literature?, Damrosch argues for a world literature that is primarily about reception and circulation beyond the local or national context rather than about production (4). For Damrosch, translation is a key component of a work’s circulation, as world literature both “gains in translation” (281) and maintains a sense of origin in this kind of cultural transfer (283). Here, however, I am primarily concerned with Damrosch’s definition of world literature as “a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” (281). This approach to literary worldness allows me to engage with Zaimoglu’s intertextual reworking of German and European literary tropes. As, according to Damrosch, there is “no single way of reading” (5), I am particularly interested in what Damrosch calls “[t]he great conversation of world literature […] among authors who know and react to one another’s work” (298). Central to my argument is the way in which Zaimoglu reacts to his literary predecessors in his recent work and how he, perhaps deliberately, primes certain processes, associations, and reactions to allow his readers to perceive him as a German, and no longer migrant, writer.

Having been perceived as a migrant or German-Turkish writer at the beginning of his career, Zaimoglu has perhaps been particularly aware of the limitations his hyphenated background may have caused in his work’s reception. Being a German writer, and being increasingly seen as such, I will further suggest, has paved the way for Zaimoglu’s worldness. Therefore, some of Said’s ideas...