Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Defining Cultural Exchange: Of Gender, the Power of Definition, and the Long Road Home
- From Text to Body: The Changing Image of “Chinese Teachers” in Eighteenth-Century German Literature
- “Was findest Du darinne, das nicht mit der allerstrengsten Vernunft übereinkomme?”: Islam as Natural Theology in Lessing's Writings and in the Enlightenment
- The Nordic Turn in German Literature
- Cultural Exchange in the Travel Writing of Friedrich Stolberg
- Aneignung, Verpflanzung, Zirkulation: Johann Gottfried Herders Konzeption des interkulturellen Austauschs
- “Wandeln an der Grenze”: Trapper und andere hybride Charaktere in der deutschsprachigen Amerikaliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts
- “Sprechen wir wie in Texas”: American Influence and the Idea of America in the Weimar Republic
- “Deutschland lebt an der Nahtstelle, an der Bruchstelle”: The Utopia of Cultural Blending in Wolfgang Koeppen's Tauben im Gras
- Colonial Legacies and Cross-Cultural Experience: The African Voice in Contemporary German Literature
- Anatolian Childhoods: Becoming Woman in Özdamar's Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei and Zaimoğlu's Leyla
- “Kanacke her, Almanci hin. […] Ich war ein Kreuzberger”: Berlin in Contemporary Turkish-German Literature
“Kanacke her, Almanci hin. […] Ich war ein Kreuzberger”: Berlin in Contemporary Turkish-German Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Defining Cultural Exchange: Of Gender, the Power of Definition, and the Long Road Home
- From Text to Body: The Changing Image of “Chinese Teachers” in Eighteenth-Century German Literature
- “Was findest Du darinne, das nicht mit der allerstrengsten Vernunft übereinkomme?”: Islam as Natural Theology in Lessing's Writings and in the Enlightenment
- The Nordic Turn in German Literature
- Cultural Exchange in the Travel Writing of Friedrich Stolberg
- Aneignung, Verpflanzung, Zirkulation: Johann Gottfried Herders Konzeption des interkulturellen Austauschs
- “Wandeln an der Grenze”: Trapper und andere hybride Charaktere in der deutschsprachigen Amerikaliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts
- “Sprechen wir wie in Texas”: American Influence and the Idea of America in the Weimar Republic
- “Deutschland lebt an der Nahtstelle, an der Bruchstelle”: The Utopia of Cultural Blending in Wolfgang Koeppen's Tauben im Gras
- Colonial Legacies and Cross-Cultural Experience: The African Voice in Contemporary German Literature
- Anatolian Childhoods: Becoming Woman in Özdamar's Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei and Zaimoğlu's Leyla
- “Kanacke her, Almanci hin. […] Ich war ein Kreuzberger”: Berlin in Contemporary Turkish-German Literature
Summary
BERLIN IS WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED as the city with the largest population of Turks outside Turkey. Turks and Turkishness are a visible and integral part of the new capital, with the district of Kreuzberg in particular often described as “little Istanbul.” Despite this urban visibility, Turkish-German authors are much less prominent in treatments of Berlin as the “capital of the German literary imagination”: an often unwitting nationalistic bias excludes non-Germans from discourses on the metropolis. This article argues for the inclusion of Turkish-German writers within Berlin literature, focusing particularly on authors whose œuvre centers on the city: Aras Ören, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Yadé Kara. It uses the image of Berlin to consider the relationship between Turks and Berliners, a deliberately asymmetric configuration, and examines the representation of the city as literary setting and historical site, and as a place of identification.
Berlin offers an alternative identity and space for negotiation and cultural inclusion. The significance of the city lies in the relationship between Turk(s) and Berliner(s), which reflects Etienne Balibar's view of immigrants in Europe:
Immigrants are others who participate in the economic and cultural life of the European nations in many of the same ways that “native” Europeans do. This is why for Balibar the immigrant is not so much an outsider who needs to be welcomed or embraced by French or European society but rather the potential model for a new form of citizenship (“citoyenneté”) and a new form of collective belonging based neither on the total identification of citizenship with nationality nor on the abstraction of a culturally disembodied citizen-subject.
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- Information
- Edinburgh German Yearbook 1Cultural Exchange in German Literature, pp. 191 - 207Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007