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Cosmopolitical Claims TURKISH-GERMAN LITERATURES FROM NADOLNY TO PAMUK By B. VENKAT MANI UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS Copyright © 2007 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-58729-584-3 Chapter One Thus Spake the Gastarbeiter Sten Nadolny's Selim oder die Gabe der Rede * * *
I was always able to speak, when I spoke about Selim. While writing it turned out: he was a phantom. I had conceived of him more than I had understood him. That does not disturb me. The fallacy was probably better than the reality.
Who should read it? Selim! Selim should read it. STEN NADOLNY, SELIM
In his volume Of Hospitality, Jacques Derrida contemplates the "Foreigner Question." At the very outset, he asks if "the question of the foreigner" is not indeed "a foreigner's question? Coming from the foreigner, from Abroad?" (3). He shifts the accent of his interrogation: "the question of the foreigner" becomes for Derrida "a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner" (ibid. 3). While registering the presence of foreigners in Plato's Sophist, Derrida reminds us that it is the foreigner, indeed, who asks the first question (ibid. 5). The arrival of the foreigner signals the birth of the question. "The Foreigner carries and puts the fearful question," Derrida asserts, "he sees or foresees himself" (ibid. 11). As he moves from the Sophist to the Statesmen to The Apology of Socrates, Derrida elaborates upon Socrates' enactment of a foreigner in front of the Athenians: "a foreigner accused in a language he says he does not speak, a defendant required to justify himself, in the language of the other" (ibid. 17). Derrida underlines the notion of "the foreigner (hostis) welcomed as a guest or as enemy" (ibid. 45). The question of the foreigner is thus established as the question of hospitality and hostility, of acceptance and accusation, of judgments and justifications. Derrida complicates the distinction between guests and hosts, arguing that the question of the foreigner as a foreigner's question emerges from the interstices of equations of guest and host, enemy and friend. In the naming of the foreigner, calling him or her xenos, hostis, or l'étranger, the polis defines itself, and the foreigner defines the polis by way of presenting his question. The foreigner acknowledges the assignment of being a foreigner simultaneous to offering the polis a predicament of willingness to engage with the foreigner. The foreigner is willing to defend himself in a language that is not his own, as the interpretative polarities of guest, host, enemy, and friend seek signification through enunciation. The foreigner empowers himself through enunciation and interrogation in the language of the polis where he is a guest. Derrida's reflections on the fragile relationship between the citizen and the foreigner mark two distinct possibilities, one more obvious than the other. The bidirectionality of the question, the necessary exchange between the host and the guest, provides political credence to the foreigner: the foreigner might not initially be perceived as a juridical or epistemological equal of the host, and yet he emerges as a subject of the polity. In addition, the foreigner presses the question of his epistemological and juridical equivalence by enunciating his question in the language of the host; the guest transforms his culpability as a foreigner into a capability.
Derrida's reflections unsettle the ontological stability that might be accrued to the foreigner-for there isn't a clear trajectory one can follow from an inferiorized, disempowered status of the foreigner to an empowered emergence of the foreigner as a subject of the polity. The possibilities that I list above remain as such; the questions of the foreigner are not necessarily answered. The enactment of foreignness by speaking the language of the host does not instantly provide clues to his acceptance. The foreigner emerges neither as a captive of his foreignness nor as an entirely emancipated and, therefore, equitable subject of the polity.
I inaugurate my discussion of representation of a Turkish guest worker in a German novel with Derrida's "Foreigner Question," not to reenact the long march from captivity to emancipation, from disempowerment to empowerment of a foreigner through a narrative. Derrida's reflections underline issues of acceptance and accusation, judgments and justifications, epistemological and juridical inequities, culpability and capability, and most importantly, silence and enunciation that infiltrate and accompany invocations and associations of the very word Gastarbeiter-a guest, whose primal familiarity to the German nation is through the justification of his existence as a laborer, but whose familiarity as a guest is at once belabored by foreignness, Fremdheit. The guest must labor to learn the language of the host to make himself be known, to present his question. The host claims benefits of the labor of the guest; the guest claims the hospitality of the host-hostility and hospitability, allowance and restriction simultaneously defining their mutual relationship.
It is helpful to consider this restrictive entitlement to the political imagination of or participation in a nation with Benedict Anderson's elaboration on "seriality." In his insightful essay "Nationalism, Identity, and the World-In-Motion: On the Logics of Seriality" (Cheah and Robbins 117-33),Anderson theorizes the formation of collective subjectivities through a distinction between "unbound" and "bound" serialities. He locates unbound serialities in the print market and identifies "nationalists, anarchists, bureaucrats, and workers" as its exemplifiers. Bound seriality originates in governmentality, and its confined and restricting character is exemplified in the finitude of terms like "Asian Americans, beurs, and Tutsis" (ibid. 117). It is through the contrast between these two kinds of serialities,Anderson claims, that the "lineaments of two kinds of politicization and political practice emerge, both of which, however, show how basic seriality always is to the modern imagining of collectivity" (ibid. 127). Anderson argues that the politics of entitlement in a nation are a function of a bound seriality generated by practices of state-sponsored numeration (e.g., census),whereas through the unenumerated, unbound seriality, the otherwise unentitled members of a collective stake their claims within and beyond the national imaginary. This distinction serves as a pointer and a framework for the following discussion of Gastarbeiter, Turks, and other foreigners in the German press since their first arrival. Although the official governmental designations for foreigners, that is, bound seriality in the Andersonian sense, will be mentioned only as they appear in the press,my focus on the unenumerated and politically unentitled foreigners should highlight the lineaments that separate national collectivities of citizenry from their noncitizen Others.
As is well known, during the formative years of the establishment of the German nation-state, in order to realize Adenauer's vision of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), the Federal Republic of Germany signed Anwerbeabkommen (recruitment agreements) with Italy (1955), Spain and Greece (1960), and Turkey (1963). As Anna Picardi-Montesardo points out, Germany's historical peculiarity with respect to foreign workers played a central role in the coinage of the term Gastarbeiter. During the industrialization of Germany in the late nineteenth century, Wanderarbeiter (moving, or migrant, workers) recruited from various eastern (and some southern) European countries worked in Germany. Around 1907, about 125,000 Wanderarbeiter were employed in German factories-including Turkish workers, who were primarily employed in the tobacco industry. Between 1939 and 1945, 7.5 million foreign workers from the German-occupied territories in France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, among others, were forced to work in Germany as replacements for workers who were fighting for the Nazi army. These workers were known as Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers). This was the primary reason why the term Fremdarbeiter could not be used again in the post-War era without invoking historical guilt. So a safer term, Gastarbeiter, was introduced, not only to imply that these workers would not be treated as the Fremdarbeiter in Nazi Germany but also to indicate that their stay in Germany would be temporary. In other words, the Gastarbeiter were expected to return to their homelands once Germany decided that they were no longer needed. The guests were expected not to overstay their invitation, but the length of the invitation was rendered ambiguous through the distribution of renewable work permits.
The first frontiers of division between us and them in German society started with the undetermined and yet renewable length of the invitation extended to the Gastarbeiter. These workers came from a Europe that was very different than Germany. The cultural peculiarity and linguistic incomprehensibility of the Gastarbeiter, their darker skins, the preexisting and prevalent notions of subjugation through headscarves for women and sexual promiscuity, dishonesty, and slyness of men-in short, German society's unfamiliarity with these workers-slowly led to anxieties about the safety and stability of Germany's national culture.
It is important to remember that a number of initial reports on Gastarbeiter in the German press were not entirely negative. National and regional newspapers tried to educate readers about the newcomers in Germany. In 1964, the Düsseldorf-based conservative newspaper Die Rheinische Post conducted a survey among its readers, "Wie stehen Sie zu den Gastarbeitern?" (How do you perceive the guest workers?). In the results published in November 1964, the newspaper had the following to report: "Most of the answers to our question, 'How do you perceive the Gastarbeiter?' appear to be explicitly positive. Clichéd conceptions-unclean, loud, women-chasers, knife-heros-were repeatedly questioned. [The readers] enthusiastically pleaded that the Gastarbeiter should not be considered and treated as second-class human beings" (Jung et al. 54). Other newspapers followed suit. From the Hamburg-based Die Welt to the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, press coverage in the 1960s focused on the necessity of Gastarbeiter in the economic and industrial reconstruction of Germany. Leading newspapers also reported on the wretched conditions in which the Gastarbeiter lived and worked. Die Zeit, for example, stated in an editorial in May 1965, "they voluntarily take up all difficult and dirty jobs which must be done, but for which there is no one to find among us" (op cit.).
This positive, affirmative, and tolerant discourse underwent a change around 1967-68, as Germany felt the first waves of an economic crisis since the end of the Second World War. As a result of the worldwide oil crisis, Germany declared an Anwerbestopp (recruitment freeze) in 1973. The word Gastarbeiter immediately became compounded with other nouns and appeared in the news media as Gastarbeiterproblem, Gastarbeiterwelle (wave), and Gastarbeiterlawine (avalanche), all referring to the alleged overpopulation of guest workers in Germany. The late 1960s and the early 1970s were precisely the years when a debate about integration and assimilation of Islamic guest workers in the primarily Protestant German society gained currency. Cultural difference, which until 1966 was championed by newspapers as a factor to be reckoned with, turned into a moral issue. In the 1970s, the religious difference of Turks from the Germans was not merely recognized and acknowledged; it was debated, contested, and presented as a force threatening the very fiber of German society. The Federal Republic seemed divided on the idea of integration, although the social isolation of guest workers and visible racial discrimination did not go unnoticed.
As a means to curb this growing distance between Germans and Turks, cities with a long history of industrial working classes like Berlin, Hamburg, Bielefeld, and Essen took steps to promote the integration of guest workers and their families into German society through special language classes in schools or through the support of social initiatives by the Ausländerbeauftragte (foreign directorates). Some states, such as Bavaria, condemned these initiatives, even actively resisted them. In December 1979, Hans Maier, the cultural minister of Bavaria, denigrated the initiatives of the city administration of Berlin by calling them Zwangsgermanisierung (forced Germanization). This accusation created a wave of articles in all major national newspapers, including the FAZ, the Frankfurter Rundschau, and the newsmagazine Der Spiegel. Participants in the debate were against any kind of forced Germanization or even the use of the term, but the importance of linguistic training and inclusion of children of the Gastarbeiter in German schools was recognized by most of the media. This style of negative reporting continued all the way up to 1982, when on October 13, 1982, Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared his plans to reduce the number of guest workers in Germany during his tenure.
These debates culminated in the passage of the Ausländerintegrationsgesetz (bill for the integration of foreigners) in 1988. The bill included an elaborate social and financial plan for the betterment of guest workers and their children. However, this development did not come without its critics. The former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt wrote in Die Zeit, "We Europeans together are strongly marked by a culture emanating from the lands of Judeo-Christian traditions; the Turks as a largely Islamic nation belong to a completely different cultural sphere, which has its home in Asia and Africa, but not in Europe" (Schmidt 7).
After the reunification of Germany in 1990, economic disparity and unemployment turned the Turks into the latest scapegoats in the history of blaming the cultural Other for a society's shortcomings. In the early 1990s, right after German unification, the burning of two hostels in Mölln and Sollingen with a majority of Turkish residents by Neo-Nazis was a manifestation of a brewing sentiment against the Turks. Udo Steinbach, director of Deutsche Welle, the radio and television channel, expressed his reaction quite succinctly:
The migration of Turks into Germany, which created a physical nearness, one that had not existed in the past, should be seen as a catalyst of a process of segregation, which has largely accelerated since the beginning of the 90s. The good comrade "far away" has over the time become an exotic entity, soon enough a troublemaker. Recruitment freeze, complaints that the Turk is very difficult to integrate, visa requirements, and last of all even residence permits for Turkish children born in Germany-these are just a few stations of segregation-so to speak at the lower levels of the society. (Steinbach 35-36)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cosmopolitical Claims by B. VENKAT MANI Copyright © 2007 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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