THE HISTORY OF THE TURKISH GERMAN NOVEL begins in 1979–1980 (Adelson 2004b). Its prehistory encompasses a vast terrain. It might include: the travel accounts or imaginary journeys written by both Turkish and German writers about the respective other land over the centuries; ballads and songs about the Crusades, or the “Terrible Turk” and the cruel infidel of the early modern Ottoman-Habsburg wars (Cheesman 2001); romances against the backdrop of the Berlin-Baghdad railway; or denunciations of and apologies for the massacres of Armenians during the First World War. Nazire Akbulut begins her study of the image of Turks in German literature from the 1970s to 1990s with the “first German-Turkish mass encounter” in the eleventh century (1993, 15). But I will begin more conventionally, in late 1961.

Hundreds of Turkish workers were already in Germany, having been recruited by businesses to meet the shortage of unskilled labor, but now there was a bilateral state agreement. In November 1961, the first trainload of official guest workers was met at Munich railway station by a group of Turkish students led by Yüksel Pazarkaya (b.1940, mig.1958). (In this chapter only, novelists are introduced with their years of birth and, if applicable, migration to Germany.) Pazarkaya was studying chemistry in Munich. He later became a prominent Turkish German intellectual: a bilingual experimental poet, short-story writer, translator, editor, essayist, broadcaster, and, recently, a nostalgic novelist who writes in Ich und die Rose (I and the Rose, 2002) about an émigré's return to Turkey in search of lost love (2002).