ONE OF ŞENOCAK'S FICTION VOLUMES — the novella Die Prärie (The Prairie, 1997) — appeared with Rotbuch, a leftist press with a strong tradition of publishing Turkish German writing, from Ören in the 1970s to Zaimoglu in the 1990s. All Şenocak's other literary work appears with the small Munich publisher Babel Verlag, and is scarcely noticed by the German public. Yet, since the late 1980s, Şenocak has been in constant demand for newspaper articles, as well as contributing to or editing numerous books, magazines, and newspaper supplements. He is hardly an outsider on the national journalistic scene. His trenchant essays on Turkish, German, and European cultural politics (collected in volumes of 1992, 1994, 2001, and 2006) are widely admired, and a selection was published in translation in the United States (2000). What is Şenocak doing wrong that denies him a mainstream German readership for his fiction and poetry?

Şenocak refuses to adopt the pose of the rebel, whether as protestor or as Romantic artist. He cultivates instead the far less popular stance of the worldly aesthete and unaligned cultural and political critic. His cosmopolitan literary allusions reference philosophically demanding texts rather than popular works. His fiction examines taboos in both German and Turkish public histories, highlighting intractable problems and conflicts, and explores subterranean links between fantasies of race, power, and sexuality. Were he to try using popular genre conventions, and/or a style that flaunts hybridity, he might well sell more books. As it is, more copies are sold on campuses worldwide than in Germany.