Unburdening the Past: Transhistorical Representations of Complicity in Contemporary Turkish-German Fiction and Film

This article examines Fatih Akın's 2017 film Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade) and Zafer Şenocak's 1998 novella Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Perilous Kinship) by focusing on how each work represents the notion of personal responsibility through the recognition of the characters' involuntary complicity in world historical atrocities. Both Akın and Şenocak create fictional situations of conflicting commitments and representations of transnational forms of solidarity in order to gesture toward the historical interconnectedness of characters who occupy uniquely hybrid cultural and ethnic positions. The article argues that what lies at the heart of both Akın's and Şenocak's inquiry into representations of violence is a profound concern with temporality—a concern that renders linguistic and geographic multiplicities secondary to the main issue of understanding and narrating past atrocities as an ever-present humanistic responsibility.