Introduction: The Politics of Archives

The archive has become a popular metaphor in German Studies. Among those working in German-Turkish studies, for instance, Leslie Adelson focused our attention on the importance of the “reconfigurations of the German national archive” (12), in her groundbreaking The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature in which she examined such reconfigurations in literary texts by Aras Ören, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Zafer Senoçak. Around that time, B. Venkat Mani also made use of the archival metaphor when analyzing Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s second novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn as both “a site of construction [. . .] and an archive” (30). In 2011, Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz, in a joint project located at the intersection of migrant and Holocaust studies, introduced the term migrant archives to address and underline the importance of trans-cultural Holocaust remembrance projects in Germany today. Given its ties to poststructuralist theory (Foucault, Derrida), and the elasticity of its connotation, it seems safe to say that the archive as a broad metaphor for thinking about questions related to cultural memory, nation states in a globalizing world, minorities, and agency will continue to do significant theoretical work going forward.

Simultaneously and symptomatic of our times, German Studies scholars, including those working in various contemporary fields, as well as contemporary writers and artists, have increased their interactions with concrete archives. Several of the essays included in this special issue, as we will see in a moment, reflect upon how working with specific archives, that is to say with sites of institutional and administrative power or artists and publishers archives rather than “sites of memory” (Nora), contribute to the analytical questions raised by the archive as metaphor, and alter our understanding of the present.

Physical archives, whether private or public, located inside larger cultural institutions or standing alone, can be described just as much by what they don’t contain, as by what they do. They do, certainly, make us seriously contemplate established narratives about a (recent) past. Archived materials tend to bring out connections and allow for imaginative associations that may destabilize existing homogenous narratives. In touching archival materials and bringing them back to life, we allow the past to break through into our present, as we critically rethink the immediacy of the latter.

Let us return to the intersection of German Studies and migration once more. In the subfield of German-Turkish Studies, for instance, a field that by-and-large has been focusing on the immediate present, with only a few scholars such as Kader Konuk or Yasemin Yildiz taking the longer view, the interest in concrete archives highlights a specific moment: one in which the pioneering actors positioned at a particular juncture of (labour) migration and post-war German culture are passing into the past.

Some of the best-known older Turkish-German writers have been turning to prominent German cultural institutions to discuss the future of their private archives. In 2010 Berlin-based Aras Ören, the first prizewinner of the recently dismantled Chamisso Prize, entrusted his Vorlass to the Akademie der Künste, which has been making his material available to researchers since 2014. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who collaged fragments of personal letters and newspaper headlines of early Turkish labour migration into her first writings, has not handed over her private materials to a public archive yet. Given the interdisciplinary nature of her œuvre and the emphasis of the collections of the Akademie der Künste, however, this particular Berlin archive also suggests itself as a good match for Özdamar’s private archive from which she generously has been making select materials available to international researchers in recent years. Access to Ören’s and Özdamar’s archival materials is likely to shift, or at least tweak, the research focus on their work. The content of these archives will draw attention to understudied aspects of Özdamar and Ören’s oeuvre, such as issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity, dialogues and collaborations with other writers and artists, and will allow for a closer look at the critical role that multilinguality and translation plays in their writings.

While public interest in the books...