IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE to read Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei and Feridun Zaimoğlu's Leyla, both set in 1950s and ‘60s Turkey, as contributions to a process of much-needed cultural exchange, informing their German readers about the pre-history of Turkish labor migration to Germany. It could even be seen as a sign of crisis in Turkish-German integration that over a decade after Özdamar's prize-winning debut novel, younger writers such as Selim Özdoğan and Feridun Zaimoğlu are “returning” to the world of their parents’ generation, setting novels of childhood in remote Anatolian locations. Is this a renewed assertion of difference, of a cultural memory remote from the concerns of post-unification German memory debates? Is the focus on young womanhood (in all three novels) attributable to the role of femininity as the privileged marker of cultural difference? Or, as shall be explored here, does “woman” function in these novels to unsettle predictable cultural norms?

Özdamar's 1992 novel captures the sense of a country in rapid transformation, and evokes a fast disappearing world. It charts a family's migration around Turkey as the father flees from creditors and seeks work, their declining fortunes mirroring the political and economic instability of the Republic as a whole. Zaimoğlu's novel, published fourteen years later, and a new departure in his prolific publishing career, also follows the fate of one, even more impoverished, and brutally patriarchal family, from the limited yet revealing perspective of the youngest daughter.