Migration in Deutschland und Europa im Spiegel der Literatur. Interkulturalität—Multikulturalität—Transkulturalität eds. by Hans W. Giessen and Christian Rink (review)

Developed from the 2015 international conference about migration in Germany and Europe held at the University of Helsinki, Hans W. Giessen's and Christian Rink's edited volume Migration in Deutschland und Europa im Spiegel der Literatur: Interkulturalität—Multikulturalität—Transkulturalität is composed of articles by European scholars of German. The multiple scholarly contributions are interspersed with poems by Nevfel Cumart, similarly on the topic of migration. An introduction by the editors limns the ambitious goals of this collection through a set of critical observations and questions. Principally, how do we escape the dogmatic essentialism and monoculturalism in literature studies, which insists on cultural and biographical designation of literature by first-, second-, and even third-generation German writers? The importance of Giessen's and Rink's call to expand the parameters of German literature studies beyond its antiquated roots in the nationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot be overstated, particularly in the German-language space. Indeed, distinct from North American German studies scholarship in the area of transcultural literary production, which witnessed this disciplinary opening and enrichening over more than a decade ago, inter alia, with Leslie Adelson's touchstone publication, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Towards a New Critical Grammar of Migration (2005), German-language literature studies (Germanistik) still seems to struggle with the new realities and directions of its object of study.

Migration in Deutschland und Europa im Spiegel der Literatur is composed of an array of individual pieces, which approach the issue of cultural diversity in German literature and literary production from different directions and through distinct works. Most of the articles focus on literary works by first-, second-, and third-generation Germans, such as Yadé Kara's Selam Berlin (2003), Navid Kermani's Wer ist Wir? Deutschland and seine Muslime (2009), Rosa Ribas's ongoing detective-novel series, and Marica Bodrožic;'s Das Wasser unserer Träume (2016), to name just a few. However, Steffen Hendel's article explores literary representations of the Yugoslavian War from otherwise "unmarked" (to borrow Fatima El-Tayeb's term "unmarkiert" [2016]) German authors in Otmar Jenner's Mörderischer Druck (1994), Peter Handke's Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau … (1996), and Sibylle Berg's Sieben Tage Krieg (1999–2000). Although the vast majority of the articles concentrate on Germany as a national and cultural space of inheritance or adoption, there is one article that moves beyond Germany completely, Janina Gesche's article on the Polish Swedish works of Jacek Kubitsky.

Intercultural dialogue is multidirectional among these articles and extends from Turkish German to Polish Swedish, German French, German Finnish, Ukrainian German, and Iranian German, and so forth. If the individual articles undertake intercultural studies, which bear a more confined focus on the relationship between two distinct cultural and linguistic spaces, then perhaps the collection as a whole could be delineated as transcultural in its scope, as an encompassing study that moves across all of these groups. Unfortunately, a more acute differentiation of the prefixes "inter-" and "trans-," and for that matter "multi-," is not forthcoming in the book.

An ostensible concern of this volume does lie in conceptualization and nomenclature. Such are themes that articles by Katharina Forster and Jana Maria Weiß attend to with purpose. With these two articles as congruent bookends, the volume importantly asks what might be the most useful terms of address. All contributing authors apply and/or consider the following terms: "interculturalism," "multiculturalism," "transculturalism," "migrant literature," "migration literature," "postmigrant society," or "hybridity." Further, several of the articles treat these terms with some scrutiny. However, an overall more critical approach to these concepts, in particular to "multiculturalism" (Slavoj Zižek, 1997; Erez Tzfadia, 2008), "postmigrant society" (Fatima El-Tayeb, 2016), and "hybridity" (Rey Chow, 1993; Kien Nghi Ha...