From Roots to Rhizomes: Similarity and Difference in Contemporary German Postmigrant Literature
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Shifting Paradigms: From Interculturality to Transculturality…to Similarity?
Saniye Uysal-Ünalan (2013) too describes texts by Şenocak and Zaimoglu as “locales of translation […], in which a dialogue between Germanness and Turkishness is staged” (p. 18). In this regard, such intercultural approaches narrow the focus of the texts to which they are applied by making them about dialogue and understanding, leading to hybrid identities. Within this paradigm, authors tend to act as representatives for an entire community, even if they do not necessary regard themselves as forming part of that community in a straightforward way. This also places the burden of creating a harmonious society on minorities, whilst, as the electoral success of the Alternative für Deutschland evidences, a large section of Germany is not interested in understanding their minority fellow citizens in the first place.The intercultural situation […] is not to be defined by the allegedly objectively existing cultural differences between the ‘culture of origin’ and the ‘majority culture’; it is, rather, characterised by the [Turkish-Germans] occupying a ‘third space’, in which they mark out the relevant differences between German and Turkish culture, creating a hybrid identity that avoids straight-forward categorization.(p. 13)
In this way, texts by non-German writers are often read as documents of their non-Germanness: as texts about how they live and feel in Germany, and not about how they write. When writing is understood as being a mouthpiece and not as the expression of poetics, of an artistic impulse, literature remains a testimony, but not art.(p. 25)
Such an understanding of cultures as inherently heterogenous and entangled brings added complexity, reinforcing criticisms of intercultural dialogue as an oversimplification. Germanists have adopted this lens to explore the work of minority writers, and how it can destabilize identity categories more fundamentally, suggesting a more nuanced view of identity and emphasizing the heterogeneous nature of interconnected cultures and the developments that happen within and across cultures, rather than just between them (Brunner 2003; Ezli 2008; Matthes 2011; Binder et al. 2016; Codina Solà 2018).[Cultures] no longer have the form of homogenous and clearly demarcated spheres or islands. Rather, they are characterised by a pluralization of possible identities and exhibit externally border-crossing contours. In this sense they are no longer cultures in the traditional sense of the word. They have become transcultural.(n.p.)
There is still a marked emphasis on ‘bridge concepts’ here—understanding, dialogue, empathy etc. (ibid, p. 41)—underpinned by a view of art and literature as “the aesthetic embodiment of meaning” (ibid., p. 37). This limits the literary text to a representative role as the container of an idea, whose meaning is, nonetheless, undermined by its literariness—what Mecklenburg refers to as its ‘poetic alterity’ (ibid., p. 49). In this regard, Heimböckel and Weinberg (2014) view interculturality “in the mode of unknowing [Nichtwissen]” (p. 131), leading to astonishment and a form of understanding that always remains deferred.Of course general hermeneutic principles also remain in effect for intercultural understanding: the subject-object as a subject-subject relation […], dialogical openness towards the other (the subject in the object), the question-answer model, the art of ‘translating’ the foreign into one’s own ‘language games’, critical self-reflection and self-relativization when interpreting, learning as the creative expansion and transformation of one’s own experience and thought patterns by paying heed to other possibilities of human interpretation.(ibid., p. 38)
Once ideas of same and different are challenged by heterogeneity, even of the self, this does not mean that we are left with unsurmountable difference, but rather by the non-dichotomous structure of similar and different.considerations of similarity thus declare scepticism towards the dichotomy between ‘self’ and ‘other’. This dichotomy, hermeneutically favoured in Europe (and especially in Germany), focuses on generating dialogue between multiple, clearly separate entities or positions, in order to achieve something like ‘higher’ values, such as tolerance of the foreign. These separate entities are usually called ‘cultures’. But the dialogue between ‘self’ and ‘foreign’ is a binary model that inappropriately simplifies the complexity of the real world—even if it is expanded with the idea of the polylogue to describe polycentric constituencies.
This concept was particularly inspired by Şenocak’s and Feridun Zaimoglu’s writing on the national taboos of both Turkey and Germany, as dealt with in Şenocak’s novel Gefährliche Verwandschaft (1998, Perilous Kinship, 2009) and Zaimoglu’s Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Kanak Speak: 24 Discordant Notes from the Margins of Society, 1995). Sandra Hestermann (2003), too, comments that the narrator of Gefährliche Verwandschaft “suggests an alternative view of history by focusing on the similarities, not the differences, in Turkey’s and Germany’s history”, such as the ruptures of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the partition of Germany, and the brutality of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (p. 356).that Germans and Turks in Germany share more culture (as an ongoing imaginative project) than is often presumed when one speaks of two discrete worlds encountering each other across a civilizational divide. Touching tales thus takes conceptual leave from a model of incommensurable differences to stress a broad range of common ground, which can be thicker or thinner at some junctures.(ibid.)
3. “Je est un Autre!”: Identity, Similarity and Subjectivity in Zafer Şenocak’s Writing
Nevertheless, Şenocak experienced his own interpellation as something that reflected his fragmentary nature, rather than his self-sameness. To his parents he was “Safer” (Zafer), but to his father’s family from Eastern Anatolia he was “Saafer” (Zaafer), leading him to question if he was another person in their company (Şenocak 2018, pp. 9–11). Once living in Germany as an eight-year-old, he suddenly became “Xafer” (Tsafer) to many, forming an “alltägliche Dreieinigkeit” (everyday trinity, ibid., p. 13). This experience can be described as one of similarity and difference. The names are different, reflecting how he too changes in different contexts, but they are similar enough in his mind to not lead to any crisis of identity: “Ich stelle mir heute vor, wie es gewesen wäre, hätte man einen Krieg um die Aussprache geführt, Saafer ständig korrigiert, sich kritisch mit Xafer auseinandergesetzt. […] Schrecklicher Gedanke, ein Bürgerkrieg um den eigenen Namen” (I imagine today how it might have been, had a war been waged over pronunciation, Zaafer constantly corrected, Tsafer critically contested. […] A terrible thought, a civil war over one’s own name, ibid.) Ultimately, for Şenocak: “Im Einklang mit sich selbst sein heißt, in Einklang mit seinen Widersprüchen zu leben” (To be in harmony with oneself means to live in harmony with ones contraditions, ibid., p. 147). On this subject of the fragmentary self, he refers to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud:the close connection between identity and interlocution also emerges as the place of names in human life. My name is what I am “called.” A human being has to have a name, because he or she has to be called, i.e., addressed. Being called into conversation is a precondition of developing a human identity, and so my name is usually given me by my earliest interlocutors.(p. 252)
“Je est un autre!” Ich ist ein Anderer! Dieser Satz […] ließ mich erschaudern, als ich ihn das erste Mal las. Er wurde zu meinem Mantra […]. Ein Leben verträgt nicht mehr als einen einzigen so mächtigen Satz. Nicht mehr als ein Auflehnen gegen dieses Gesamtpaket ICH. Eine Erwartung des Widerspruchs. Eine Akzeptanz der inneren Zerrissenheit. […] Was Rimbaud als ausschweifende Sinnlichkeit der Poesie beschrieben hatte, war für mich eine neue Form der Wahrnehung, mit der ich die Grenzen zwischen Vater und Mutter, Türkei und Deutschland, München und Berlin, Türkisch und Deutsch, Glauben und Skepsis zu überschreiten versuchte.
As Bhatti and Kimmich explain, it is not a matter or harmonizing differences, but of accommodating and accepting them.[“Je est un autre!” I is an other! This sentence […] made me shudder as I read it for the first time. It became my mantra […]. Life can only tolerate a single sentence as powerful as this. Nothing more than a revolt against this total package, I. Anticipation of opposition. Acceptance of inner turmoil. […] What Rimbaud had described as the excessive sensuality of poetry was a new way of perceiving for me, with which I tried to cross the borders between father and mother, Turkey and Germany, Munich and Berlin, Turkish and German, faith and scepticism.](ibid., p. 14)
Viel zu oft wird davon ausgegangen, dass ein schnelles Vergessen, woher man kommt, förderlich beim Einleben in eine neue, fremde Umgebung sei. Herkunft aber ist nicht immer problematisch, schon gar nicht immer ein Trauma. Sie ist auch Bindung, die im Unsichtbaren wirkt. Wie die Rhizome zwischen den Wurzelwerken im Erdreich, dem Wurzelstock.
Like Deleuze and Guattari, Şenocak contrasts the solitary tree, standing for a linear understanding of history, with the network of interconnected roots beneath the surface: the rhizome. These underground cultural connections are, for Şenocak, in the subconscious realms of dreams, memories and fantasies, calling to mind the decentred subject of psychoanalysis. Şenocak is interested in this hidden realm and its potential to bring similarities to the fore: “Ich neige dazu, die Berührungsgeschichte der Kulturen eher mit den Verhältnissen im Erdboden zu vergleichen als zwischen den ungeschützten Baumkronen” (I tend towards comparing the history of cultural contact with the relations under the soil, rather than between the exposed tree crowns, ibid., p. 91). Şenocak therefore avoids the pitfalls that interculturality and hybridity encountered in the German context by extending his critique of unity and sameness to the self, partly by focusing on the subconscious. In contrast to the concept of dialogue, Bhatti and Kimmich (2018b) also regard relationships of similarity as marking “something spontaneous, involuntary, unconscious, even something unwanted or passive” (p. 6). Rather than the inaccessibility of the subconscious being a drawback of Şenocak’s approach, understanding is not the goal here. Instead, the imprecision of similarity prevents any straight-forward equivalences and levelling of differences, but allows “syncretic possibilities to emerge” (ibid., p. 7). Şenocak complicates our linear conceptualizations of history and culture, focussing, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s (2013) example, not on traces that can be followed from start to finish, but by mapping out connections that have no origins or endings.[It is all too often assumed that quickly forgetting where one came from is necessary to settle into a new, foreign environment. Origins are, however, not always problematic, and certainly not always traumatic. They are also a connection that operates unseen. Like rhizomes between root systems in the earth, the rootstock.](ibid., p. 90)
Schneerestedie Wipfel streiten sich um ihren Anteilder Wind wirft die Sträuchersterne umein Passant hält inne und wird ansässigim Nebel nicht mehr zu hören das Nebelhornder Erinnerungsfähren die im Eis steckengeblieben sindwenn das Tauwetter kommtwird eine untergegangene Welt auferstehenund der Passant weiter ziehenauf dem Blütenstaub des Meeresvielleicht noch zu erkennen an seinem Schneebart (Şenocak 2005, p. 26)
This imagery of “Erinnerungsfähren” recalls Şenocak’s plea for a greater understanding of our multiple heritages, which he describes as a wider “Erinnerungshorizont” (horizon of memory), “der uns hinter unsere Berührungsängste führen könnte” (which could move us beyond our fear of contact (Konzett 2003, p. 135)). There is also a clear contrast between the treetops on the one hand, and the submerged world on the other, which recalls his comments on the rhizome quoted above. The wintery paralysis can, therefore, be read as what blocks such rhizomatic connections being established, and the imagery of the “Schneebart” suggests possible readings in both the German and Turkish contexts, as either a pun on Hitler’s metonymic Schnurrbart (moustache), or as indicating an Orthodox Muslim identity through rules regarding facial hair, both suggesting a shift towards the homogeneity and coercion, or perhaps historic legacies that reach into the present.[Leftover snowthe treetops fight over their sharethe wind overturns the starry shrubsa passer-by pauses and becomes a residentin the fog he no longer hears the foghornof the ferries of memory that have got stuck in the icewhen the thaw comesa sunken world will ariseand the passer-by continueon the pollen of the seaperhaps still recognisable by his slush-tache]
In der deutschen Romantik ist der Orient nicht nur ein Gewand. Er ist eine Tonlage, übergegangen in die Stimme, die Mundart des Sprechers. So wird Deutsch auch zu einer orientalischen Sprache. Ohne diese Spache hätte Goethe seinen Diwan nicht schreiben können, Aber auch Novalis nicht seine Hymnen an die Nacht.
By focussing on the otherness within, rather than banishing it onto an Other (here, the Orient), German was able to become an Oriental language in the hands of Goethe and the Romantics. As the above quote suggests, Şenocak thus equally regards language in translation as a question of similarities, rather than direct equivalences, and this forms part of his call for a broader understanding of our heritages and pasts as a means of being able to multiply the lines of our rhizome: “Sprachen können Menschen bewegen, von einem Land ins andere, von einer Kultur in die nächste” (Languages can move people, from one country into another, from one culture into the next, ibid., p. 82). Not German and Turkish, but the interplay of German and English and their similarities and differences are at the heart of Uljana Wolf’s poetry cycle “DICHTionary”, which similarly avoids notions of harmonization and unity.In German Romanticism, the Orient is not only a costume. It is a pitch carried over into the voice, the dialect of the speaker. In this way, German became an Oriental language too. Without this language Goethe would not have been able to write his Divan and Novalis his Hymns to the Night.
4. “The Uncrossable That Will Be Crossed”: Similarity and Multilingualism in “DICHTionary” by Uljana Wolf
In a similar way to the different pronunciations of ‘Zafer’ outlined above, it is this internal multilingualism that Wolf brings to the fore, shattering any notion of linguistic purity. To return to the concept of the rhizome, for Deleuze and Guattari (2013), too, the tree-model of language families is inadequate for showing how language “forms a bulb”, how it “evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil” (pp. 6–7). What is needed to better analyse how languages evolve is a “method of the rhizome type”, which “can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers” (ibid.). Wolf’s poems perform such a decentring of German and English to reveal their inherent impurity, rendering them unfamiliar in the process.For the monolingual paradigm, the mother tongue is the site of nativity and pure origin. But what if this mother tongue itself is not really monolingual, homogenous, and fully familiar? After all, all languages are sites of constant traffic, of a constant transformative give-and-take between and within them. Yet when the strict separation of languages is central for maintaining the distinctness of other associated categories such as nations and cultures, this view of the mother tongue as internally multilingual can appear threatening.(p. 67)
vase is a vase is a vase, und das gilt, scheints, für jedes wort, dastiefer ist als breit. bereit? ornament is not a vase although it comesin one. word is some people come in what they think must be avase, for they deflower it. what a lack of depth, and wit. ornament,ornament, i understand your bored lament. you need a lover whowould write a vase a letter: dear word, you’re not a vessel.(ibid., p. 31)
[vase ist eine vase ist eine vase—and it’s the samefor any word that’s deeper that wide. shall welook inside? ornament is not a vase although itcomes with one. word is some people come inwhat they think must be a vase, for they deflowerit. what a lack of depth, and wit. ornament,ornament, i’m tired of your bored lament. youneed a lover who would write a vase a letter: dearword, you’re not a vessel.]
wir waren, und erst recht beim rauchen, nie ein gutes match. i hadno qualms, ich tat es überall, dir wurde es zur qual. als wir trotzdicker schwaden einmal funken fingen, suchtest du den nächstenquell, um nach deiner faden art feuer zu bezwingen. oops, daist es aus. wie du willst. für meinen glim stehen andere leuteschlange. mit hölzern, sogar stangen, die roten kugelköpfe leuchten.
The poem involves a couple disagreeing about smoking, deploying the usual fire imagery for falling in love. Being “ein gutes match” plays on the double meaning of the English ‘match’, but also recalls the German word ‘Matsch’ (sludge or mud), which, although it does not make much sense and has the wrong article, resonates with the wet imagery. The phrase “i had no qualms” is particularly confusing to the bilingual reader, as in English it means that the poetic persona did not mind smoking, but the link to the German word ‘Qualm’ (billow of smoke) contradicts the meaning of the English. Conversely, the word ‘quell’, meaning to extinguish in this context (‘bezwingen’, as mentioned later on in the poem), is reinforced by the German ‘Quell(e)’ (source or spring), as water is used to put out fire.[we were never a good match, especially notwhile smoking. me, i had no qualms, i lit up allover, and for this you disqualified me. whennonetheless sparks sprang up in the smoky air,you sought a spring to quench the fire in yourown quiet way. so now it’s over and out. well,suit yourself. quality squires are lined up waitingfor me to kindle them: on sticks or bound inbooks, their jolly red heads aglow.]
5. “A Jew and a Muslim—That Won’t End Well”: Similarity and Failed Interreligious Dialogue in Feridun Zaimoglu and Günther Senkel’s Nathan Messias
The ambivalence of privileging similarity over difference is foregrounded by Hughes’s study, as similarities become an artificial construct that is imposed on religions for political reasons at the expense of other traits and aspects, which are ignored. Through different characters who are either Jews, Christians or Muslims, Zaimoglu and Senkel’s play Nathan Messias critiques such an approach to interreligious dialogue that, like interculturality at times, treats religions as, to borrow Adelson’s (2005) words, “originary, mutually exclusive, and intact, the boundaries between them clear and absolute” (p. 4). Whereas Şenocak and Wolf dispense with any idea of sameness in their engagement with similarities, the flawed protagonists of Zaimoglu and Senkel’s play fail to extend the concept of similarity to its logical conclusion and challenge the self–other binary, choosing instead to engage in what Bhatti and Kimmich (2018b) would describe as a form of “intentional and wilful ‘similarization’” (p. 6).Most works devoted to ‘Abrahamic religions’ take their existence for granted and proceed to uncover a set of phenomenological similarities among them. It is not uncommon, for example, to see studies devoted to ‘Abrahamic’ notions of monotheism or faith, or to more modern virtues such as peace and justice.(p. 3)
This religion of reason is referred to by Benno von Wiese (1968) as “humanitarian religion” (p. 175) and ties in with universalist cosmopolitanisms that are rooted in the notion that humans will all come to agree upon the same universal laws as they become more rational and their differences recede and identity reaches its completion. “Complete humanity”, says Wiese, “may approximately be called complete reason in Lessing’s thought” (ibid., p. 72). Consequently, to present Nathan as the founder of a new religion is not the radical departure from the original that it first seems. However, other comparisons and critiques are at work in this multifaceted play.Lessing supposes that the revelations of Moses and Christ are God’s (or Providence’s) way of gradually educating humankind; their content could have been discovered by unaided human reason, but the providential process of education speeds things up. Thus the revelation of Moses was made to a savage and child-like people in the appropriately crude language of rewards and punishments; but when these moral lessons were in danger of being obscured by rabbinical over-ingenuity, a better instructor came in the person of Christ with a new schoolbook. Humanity will become mature when we no longer need such artificial inducements to morality and are able to do good because it is good.(p. 113)
What could be considered a similarity under the banner of ‘Abrahamic religions’ is, in actual fact, divisive. Whereas Koschorke sees this as an argument for the discourse on similarity to be coupled with that of cosmopolitanism, Nathan Messias would suggest that similarity remains impotent in the face of conflict if the idea of sameness still remains, and sameness is at the root of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism’s universalism.Both sides of the conflict fall back on apocalyptic end-time scenarios shared by the Abrahamic religions […]. The problem here is that there is too much underlying agreement between the parties: the opponents are not different enough from one another to be able to break out of the mimetic spiral of violent symbolism.(ibid., p. 31)
Abraham, Isaak und Jacob segnen mich.Jesus, Sohn des Josef, segnet mich.
Mohammed, das Siegel der Propheten, segnet mich.Diese Stadt soll erstrahlen in meinem Ruhm, der da ist das Himmelslicht
This tactic reflects the supersessionist reality behind the inclusive term ‘Abrahamic’, used by religions as competing claims rather than as a basis for dialogue and harmonization:[Abraham, Isaac and Jacob bless me.Jesus, son of Joseph, blesses me.Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets, blesses me.This city shall shine in my glory, which is the light of heaven.](ibid., p. 21)
Rather than a linear understanding of the ‘roots’ of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Hughes describes a more rhizomatic network of interactions and connections.Although there exist certain family resemblances or commonalities among the three religions, there exists no compelling reasons for creating an omnibus canopy under which manifold Judaisms, Christianities, and Islams neatly cohabit. Their resemblances or commonalities have nothing to do with a shared essence or with a religious patrimony. Rather, many of the similarities that we perceive in these three religions are the result of real historical interactions. For example, that Paul would emphasize the Abrahamic roots of Jesus’s message or that Muhammad would perceive himself as the restorer of the original “religion of Abraham” (millat Ibrāhīm) is not an essential property that clearly reveals their “Abrahamic roots,” but an ideological move to legitimate the new in light of the old.
6. Conclusions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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1 | All translations in this article are by the author, unless otherwise noted. Where the literary texts under analysis are concerned, the original German is also provided. |
2 | The play was first performed in 2006, directed by Anna Badora at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. |
3 | For a concise history of this development, see Sievers and Vlasta (2018). It is also worth noting that German Literature in a New Century (Gerstenberger and Herminghouse 2008) is the only volume among those referenced above that situates minority writers alongside writers from the majority culture within wider trends, rather than treating them separately as a trend in themselves. |
4 | Given the complex language in these poems, the translations are only approximate, but they nevertheless give a good sense of the content and wordplay in the originals. |
5 | If ‘ornament’ is pronounced in German here, a rhyme with ‘lament’ is created, providing another source of irritation for the reader who might only notice this once they have already read it. |
6 | This resonates with Theodor W. Adorno’s understanding of the power of Fremdwörter to highlight that the German language is not fixed, but rather in a state of constant transformation, needing to express new ideas. See Yildiz (2012, pp. 84–94). |
7 | In this regard, the vagueness of similarity, as opposed to sameness, should also inform our view of such labels. |
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Twist, J. From Roots to Rhizomes: Similarity and Difference in Contemporary German Postmigrant Literature. Humanities 2020, 9, 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030064
Twist J. From Roots to Rhizomes: Similarity and Difference in Contemporary German Postmigrant Literature. Humanities. 2020; 9(3):64. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030064
Chicago/Turabian StyleTwist, Joseph. 2020. "From Roots to Rhizomes: Similarity and Difference in Contemporary German Postmigrant Literature" Humanities 9, no. 3: 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030064