As German as Kafka

Front matter

IDENTITY AND SINGULARITY IN GERMAN LITERATURE AROUND 1900 AND 2000

LENE ROG IK

LEUVEN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter 1 Constitutive outsiders

1.1 Ambivalences of Kultur and Aufklärung Constructions of German identity Kultur versus Zivilisation

1.2 “Trapped by the image of a rejected self”—Jews in Germany, German Jews Emancipation and acculturation (1770-1880) Modern anti-Semitism and Jewish dissimilation (1880-1933) The ambivalence of assimilation

1.3 Areluctant country of immigration From emigration to immigration Kultur in the aftermath of non-policy: MultiKulti—Leitkultur— ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’

1.4 Literature, identity, and singularity

Chapter 2 Aesthetes between identity and opposition 2.1 The authenticity paradox—Writing between identity and opposition

2.2 The aesthete’s retreat: Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else (1924) versus Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung (2007)

67 67

The ‘value’ of cultural difference: Arthur Schnitzler and Navid Kermani 74

A conflict of codes: ‘aesthetics of opposition’ versus ‘aesthetics of identity’

2.3 The aesthete’s awakening: Beer-Hofmann’s Der Tod Georgs (1900) versus Zaimoglu’s Liebesbrand (2008) Jewish aesthete and romantic rebel: Richard Beer-Hofmann and Feridun Zaimoglu Realitatsablehnung & experiences of finitude Aesthetics of becoming—The ambivalent rhetoric of blood

Chapter 3 City dwellers between difference and indifference

3.1 Images of the city: emancipatory visions and spatialized difference Berlin: image of an unsettled national identity Indifference to difference The city asa site of Jewish self-definition Urban stereotype and spatialized difference

3.2 The failure of exemplarity— ‘Figures of immanence’: Ludwig Jacobowski’s Werther, der Jude (1892) versus Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (2004) Exemplarity, identification, alienation ‘Figures of immanence’: the atomic individual versus the Leerstelle Metropolitan milieus: ‘the law of the proper’ versus Verletzbarkeit

3.3 Disoriented city dwellers—Figures of ‘distanced proximity’: Franz Hessel’s Spazieren in Berlin (1929) versus Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Der Hof im Spiegel” (2001) Reading the city Disoriented/dis-Oriented city dwellers

102 109 122

143 144 146 148 149

151 151 155 163

170 171 180

Contents

Chapter 4 Family heroes between myth and storytelling 4.1 Writing in the shadow of an empire

4.2 Family heroes redefined: Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch (1932) versus Dimitré Dinev’s Engelszungen (2003)

Storytellers between empires and nations:Joseph Roth and Dimitré Dinev

“Listening to the same story”— Heroic grandfathers and the power of fiction

“Against the confines of the image” —Un-/antiheroic grandsons and the power of storytelling

4.3 “Diaspora’s children” —Heroics of endurance and hope: Joseph Roth’s Hiob (1930) versus Zsusza Bank’s Der Schwimmer (2002) Between East and West—Between pathos and hope: Joseph Roth and Zsuzsa Bank Communities of violence— Communities of silence Allowing something to be said—Hope emerging from silence

Conclusion The fallibility of Bildung

Notes Introduction Chapter 1: Constitutive outsiders Chapter 2: Aesthetes between identity and opposition Chapter 3. City dwellers between difference and indifference Chapter 4. Family heroes between myth and storytelling Conclusion: The fallibility of Bildung

199 199

251 257 269

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study would never have made its way out of the labyrinth without the indispensable support from a great many individuals. My sincere gratitude goes out to Anke Gilleir, for her meticulous readings, her unwavering confidence, her intellectual generosity, and for arousing my interest in this highly relevant topic; to Vivian Liska, for reminding me of the potential dangers in historical comparison; to Bart Philipsen, for encouraging me to explore the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy. I also wish to thank the Research Foundation Flanders for allowing me to conduct my research in a comfortable manner; Leuven University Press, KU Leuven Libraries, and the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access for the realization of this publication. And finally, I would like to thank my office mates Benedicte and Debbie; my friends Hanne and Isa; my parents-in-law, my Geschwister, my parents, and most of all Bert, Noor, and Tess.

INTRODUCTION’

“What is Enlightenment at the beginning of the 21* century? [Was ist Aufklärung am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts?}”? In his plea for a Europe beyond the national paradigm, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck argues that an embrace of Enlightenment values is more urgent than ever. Europe, he argues, suffers from a paradox: “Whoever thinks of Europe as a large nation [...] awakens the national primal fears of Europeans: either Europe or the European nations—a third option is simply impossible [Wer Europa als Großnation denkt [...] weckt die nationalen Urängste der Europäer: entweder Europa, oder die europäischen Nationen—ein Drittes ist ausgeschlossen].” Yet in order to allay the fears of member states, “that with their approval of the European Constitution they commit cultural suicide [dass sie mit ihrer Zustimmung zur Europäischen Verfassung kulturellen Selbstmord begehen], they must step outside of a national concept of Europe, and rethink it from a cosmopolitan perspective— “a Europe of differences, of acknowledged national particularities [das Europa der Differenz, der anerkannten nationalen Partikularitäten].”? Beck rephrases Kant’s sapere aude in terms of the courage to acknowledge religious, cultural, and national pluralism and to strive for equality despite those differences:

Have the courage to engage your ‘cosmopolitan view, i.e. to profess your multiple identities: to connect the lifestyles born of language, skin color, nationality, or religion with the awareness that in the radical precariousness of the world everyone is equal and everyone is different.

[Habe den Mut, dich deines ‘kosmopolitischen Blickes’ zu bedienen, das heißt, dich zu deinen vielfältigen Identitäten zu bekennen: die aus Sprache, Hautfarbe, Nationalität oder Religion erwachsenen Lebensformen mit dem Bewusstsein zu verbinden, dass in der radikalen Unsicherheit der Welt alle gleich sind und jeder anders ist.]*

Beck revisits the Enlightened foundations of the European project in a context of radical global insecurity. At the onset of the twenty-first century the effects of decades-long globalization processes and migration waves are evident in the increasingly diversified ethnic, cultural, and religious makeup of Western societies. Yet the apparent triumph of ‘the global’ over ‘the local’ is only one aspect of that Unsicherheit. Europe today bears the traces of a fundamental tension of modernity: alongside globalizing tendencies and transnational cultural processes, it has also witnessed the resurgence of nationalism and particularism. In the light of European ideological history, this is a “remarkable reversal, a most unexpected turn of events,” according to Stuart Hall.’ Both the liberal and the Marxist paths of modernization “implied that the attachment to the local and the particular would gradually give way to more universalistic and cosmopolitan or international values and identities; that nationalism and ethnicity were archaic forms of attachment—the sorts of thing that would be ‘melted’ away by the revolutionizing force of modernity.” Instead, “the intensification of worldwide relations,” which affect “distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa,” seems to go hand in hand with its opposite: the insistence on the local and the particular.

That tension is especially evident in Germany, a country that—unlike Britain or France—has a very limited colonial history, and struggles to this day with its status as a country of immigration, even if it houses a ‘minority’ of 17 million people with migration backgrounds.* The presence of that minority of millions is—in part—the long-term effect of an economic globalization process initiated with foreign recruitment agreements between the 1950s and the 1970s. Since then, and with renewed intensity after the 9/11 attacks, the visibility of religious and cultural difference in German society has been the topic of heated debate. Any debate about the ‘Other’ is indirectly a demarcation of one’s own identity. Indeed, the intensity of the Leitkultur debate (2000/2001) illustrates how Germany struggles to define itself as an inclusive Einwanderungsland and instead continues to adhere to national concepts of culture and identity, as the more recent successes of Alternative für Deutschland confirm. In other words, Germany, like Europe, is affected deeply by that modern tension between the globaland the local, the universal and the particular.

How, then, does Aufklärung fit the German context? Over the last couple of years, the debate on immigration and integration has been fueled by a perhaps familiar but in fact oversimplifying distinction between defenders of Western civilization and the perceived opponents of its secular, Enlightened foundations. The debate recently flared to new heights as thousands of people marched the streets of Dresden, protesting the ‘Islamisierung des Abendlandes’. Yet although the current debate feels urgent and unique, it is not entirely without historical precedent. Both at the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century, Germany witnessed polarizing discourses on identity, culture, and nationhood. In these debates, two groups of people were increasingly considered as outsiders of ‘the’ German nation: at the beginning of the twentieth century they were Jews; at the end of the twentieth century they were immigrants. There needs to be no argument about the differences between both historical periods. Jews have had a longer presence on German ‘soil’ than many so-called authentic Germans. And there is the caesura of the Shoah, the irredeemable cut through the history of civilization that is often banalized in discussions about exclusion. Yet these crucial differences should not obscure the long history of Jews in Germany before the Shoah, nox the valuable insights that their history may offer.

The social position of German Jews, among whom many strongly identified with the Enlightenment project, puts the frequent references to Aufklarung today in an interesting historical perspective. German Jews around 1900 and new German citizens around 2000 found themselves in comparable paradoxical positions. Despite the emphasis on their perceived cultural or racial incompatibility, heightened by increasingly explicit anti-Semitic or xenophobic sentiment, the society German Jews and ‘new’ Germans live in continues to insist on adaptation, assimilation, and integration. This paradox reveals a more fundamental contradiction at the heart of the German integration debate. The apparent conflict between Aufklarung and its opponents seems to cover a tendency to functionalize Enlightened values in the promotion of an exclusive German identity. The belief in an inclusive society of equals that informs assimilation and integration processes then hits a wall: outsiders are promised access, but when they obtain the key, the locks appear to have been changed.

This investigation compares literary endeavors by German Jews and by ‘new’ Germans who find themselves caught in that social paradox, in which, despite the broken promise of inclusion and the insistence on differences, assimilation and integration continue to be required by host societies. At both ends of the twentieth century, authors and artists were and are sensitive to various questions of cultural identity—of normativity, coercion, exclusion, assimilation, or hybridity—many of which have been disclosed and digested in a fascinating diversity of artistic modes. While history has proven that art and literature are vulnerable to ideological cooptation, to instrumentalization in identity formation or national(istic) programs, many literary texts can be regarded to function as a particular kind of “social imaginary” as well. As a highly subtle form of art it communicates the ways “people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, [...] the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations”? As such, it may add more nuance to the public debate. Whereas ‘cultural identity’ is often used as a static description of an individual’ life, or of the experience of collectivities, many literary texts fathom and expose irritating and insolvable complexities that are missing from the debate and from its conviction of ‘common sense’. Nevertheless, the literary endeavors of German Jews and new Germans are confronted with an Identitatszwang that deeply affects their self-perception as writers and their role as intellectuals. They are expected to account for, represent, mediate, or reject their perceived cultural difference through fiction, or to take a stand in political and social matters that involve their minority position. As a result, they are torn between the allure of artistic autonomy and the fear of losing social relevance as intellectuals. By comparing a selected number of literary texts, this study reveals comparable tensions manifesting themselves in the two periods and show some remarkable common patterns in the variegated responses to that imperative of identity. A range of issues related to the ‘politics’ of literature will be addressed. How does literature intervene in the debate on culture, identity, and difference? Does it subvert, question, or resist the assumptions that govern the discussion? Or does it withdraw from it altogether, taking position on a side stage instead? How does it resist the myth-making on which nations founded themselves? And, finally, can literature imagine a way out of the dead end that the Enlightened promise seems to have reached?

The title may have fooled the reader: this is not a study on Franz Kafka. It is, nevertheless, an investigation into the intricate connection between literature and identity that Kafka has come to represent—almost to the point of commonplace. The title refers to a quote by the Iranian-German writer and intellectual Navid Kermani. In an interview for the magazine Literaturen, four “not quite German writers [nicht ganz deutsche Autoren]”’°

—Kermani, Terézia Mora, Imran Ayata, and Wladimir Kaminer—are asked about the ‘added value’ of cultural difference to their writing. To the interviewer's suggestion that they are not “German authors

[...] in the sense of Goethe or Thomas Mann [deutsche Autoren [...] im Sinne von Goethe oder Thomas Mann]; Kermani responds that he considers himself “German rather in the sense of Kafka [deutsch eher im Sinne von Kafka]! even if he finds national designations irrelevant in aliterary context. His Kafka reference at first seems to indicate a strong identification with the German literary canon, from which the interviewer apparently excludes him. Yet Kermani’s response is also, especially, an ironic reminder of the cultural heterogeneity of that national canon. For Kafka was, of course, not a German. First, he was an Austrian living in the multiethnic, multilingual Austro-Hungarian conglomerate. After the triumph of nationalist differences in the First World War, he became a Czech who belonged to a German-speaking Jewish elite in Bohemia surrounded by strong Czech and (now minority) German nationalist sentiments. The designation ‘German’ thus hardly captures the linguistic, cultural, and national complexity that Kermani’s Kafka reference evokes. Precisely that heterogeneity is the reason why his comparison makes sense—the historical analogy is not merely anecdotal. At both ends of the twentieth century German-Jewish writers and writers from non-German backgrounds were and are well aware of how the multiplicity of their national, cultural, or religious identities affects their writing and their reception as ‘not quite German’ writers.

This study investigates that historical analogy by comparative close reading of a selection of texts. The comparison demonstrates that in a context of intense identity discourses and perceived threat to “German’ values, many literary texts seem to re-enter into an implicit dialogue with the Enlightenment, a dialogue that does not involve a return to but a re-evaluation of its premise: Bildung—the humanistic ideal of self-cultivation—and the insistence on autonomy as the precondition of a society of equal individuals. The different literary texts reveal a wavering confidence in Enlightened individualism, while at the same time drawing contours of unexpected, tentative, and ephemeral forms of intimacy. The distinctly relational individuals engendered by fleeting forms of connection resist the embrace of collective identities. Instead, the texts imagine a variety of fragile senses of community in defiance of the monolithic rhetoric of otherness and incompatibility that characterizes the communis opinio.

The comparison builds a bridge between two productive fields of study that have remained largely unrelated: interkulturelle Germanistik and German- Jewish studies. German-Jewish studies focus on the relations between European Jewish communities and German-speaking society from a broad historical, social, and cultural perspective. Exemplary would be Arno Herzig’s Jüdische Geschichte in Deutschland. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (2002).'* These investigations analyze, among other themes and periods, the Haskalah—the

Jewish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century—as do for example Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin in New Perspectives on the Haskalah (2001); the Jewish acculturation process, as investigated by Shulamit Volkov in Das jüdische Projekt der Moderne (2001);'* the history of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic rhetorics in the German public debate, which Marcel Stoetzler analyzes in The State, the Nation, and the Jews (2008);'° and the Holocaust and postwar European history. The study of German-Jewish literature within that framework is rich and variegated. Its scope ranges from encyclopedic works on German-Jewish authors such as Sander Gilman’s and Jack Zipes’ Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture (1997) and Andreas B. Kilcher’s Metzler Lexikon der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur (2000),'° to studies of more specific cultural contexts such as Cultural Zionism, of which Mark Gelber’s Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (2000) is a revealing investigation,” to analyses from a gender perspective, like Barbara Hahn’s Die Jüdin Pallas Athene (2002).'8

Interkulturelle Germanistik deals with a far more limited historical period. It developed as a subfield of Germanistik only after the emergence of so-called guest workers’ literature in the 1980s,” but it has widened its scope. A standard work is Carmine Chiellino’s Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland (2000). From an institutional point of view, interkulturelle Germanistik reveals conspicuous contrasts between the theoretical approaches of German Studies in the United States or Britain and of the Germanistik ‘intra muros’, where postcolonial theory and ‘minority writing’ have only recently started shifting away from the margins of literary study. In German studies, ‘new’ German literatures and theoretical concepts of the representation of cultural identity have been central research topics, as in for instance Leslie Adelson’s The Turkish Turn (2005) and Tom Cheesman’s Cosmopolite Fictions (2005).”! In German studies, these ‘new literatures are also studied from a wider perspective that includes them in the whole of contemporary German literature, as in Lyn Marven’s and Stuart Taberner’s Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century (2011)” and of gender studies, as illustrated by Brigid Haines’ and Margaret Littler’s Contemporary Women’s Writingin German: Changing the Subject (2004).

Despite their different foci, German-Jewish studies and interkulturelle Germanistik address issues of cultural identity in a German(-language) context. They engage with questions of cultural difference, adaptation, and exchange; they investigate mechanisms of subjection and exclusion, stereotype and prejudice; and they reflect on the power relations between so-called minority and majority groups. Yet a comparison between them has rarely been made.

A few recent contributions have already pointed out interesting parallels between German-Jewish writing around 1900 and contemporary ‘literature of migration. In Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012), Yasemin Yildiz investigates “the postmonolingual condition” and the impact of the “monolingual paradigm” from a historical perspective, focusing on the writings of Kafka, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Yoko Tawada, and Feridun Zaimoglu.”* Liesbeth Minnaard, in New Germans, New Dutch (2008), points out that a “trialogue” between Germans, Jews, and Turks—or other minorities—may be a valuable approach in debates on identity. The concept of triangulation may break away from the problematic and limiting situation in which, implicitly, “the position of all other minorities in Germany is measured and negotiated in relation to [the] German-Jewish trauma.””> An approach that takes into account multiple relations—historically or comparatively—may “achieve a more differentiated reflection of (xenophobic, anti-Semitic or racist) structures of Othering and discrimination.””° Minnaard demonstrates that such a comparative approach between Dutch and German minority literatures is fruitful. As I aim to illustrate, a historical comparison as well yields interesting parallels between writers from different periods who all acutely sensed and addressed the vexed issue of ‘belonging’.

Any historical comparison warrants caution. A juxtaposition of German- Jewish literature and contemporary ‘literature of migration’ must remain aware of the implications of the comparative process itself. On a fundamental historical level, it should be noted that Nazism and the Shoah constitute a moment of incommensurability between German Jews and ‘new German citizens. The comparability of anti-Semitism and what is commonly referred to as ‘isLamophobia’” is, to say the least, up for debate. The anti-Semitic discourse that led to the Holocaust is deeply rooted in European and German history, and from that historical perspective bears only limited resemblance to the anti- Islamic sentiments that flared to new heights after the 9/11 attacks. The danger in 28 resides in the abstraction—and potentially banalization—of very specific, different commonplace analogies such as “Gestern die Juden, heute die Muslime”

historical contexts. Therefore, the present selection of German-Jewish texts is limited to the period before 1933. Hitler’s rise to power marks the moment when anti-Semitism becomes official state ideology, and any ground for comparison is lost. Even so, while it is difficult to blank out the course of history from our contemporary perspective on pre-war German-Jewish relations, it would be a loss—from both historical and literary perspectives—if that ‘teleological awareness’ made it impossible to look for parallels in a past that preceded the Shoah. The observation that, at both ends of the twentieth century, a considerable group of writers were confronted with a hostile climate and addressed issues of identity, exclusion, or community, should be food for thought.

From a literary perspective, it could be argued that “the comparison of the cultural expressions of different languages, nations, peoples in practice seems always constrained by an invisible binary bind in which comparison must end either by accentuating differences or by subsuming them under some overarching unity.” Armed with that awareness, the literary analyses in this study consistently take into account the historical contexts of individual texts. Although inspired by a comparable social paradox, the comparison will be executed primarily on a thematic level. The close readings are clustered around similar themes and motifs: the artist and the aesthete, the metropolitan experience, and (post-) imperial forms of (anti-) heroism. These clusters support an approach to coercive mechanisms of assimilation, compliance, stereotype, and collective identity, leading to an argument about the modern individual. In other words, the present investigation aims to acquire more insight into the ‘politics’ of literature against the background of historical and social realities.

A methodological concern involves the delineation of the object of study. When I refer to ‘German-Jewish literature’ or ‘intercultural literature’ I do so with reservation, in the awareness that the study of minority writing involves a typical and inevitable paradox. It brings down a corpus of texts to a common denominator—usually the author’s Jewish or non-German origins. Yet even a brief glance at the field uncovers an aesthetic, thematic, and generic variety that defies such categorization. A strict biographical delineation reduces writers and their works to their ‘ethnic’ belonging. As such, it reproduces and reinforces the differences and power relations that these texts often seem to challenge. By designating a separate status to minority writers, their outsider position is once more confirmed in terms of their artistic endeavors.

That paradox has visibly affected the two fields of study. In an essay on the question “What is ‘German-Jewish literature’? [Was ist ‘deutsch-jiidische Literatur’?]? Andreas B. Kilcher remarks that, despite considerable critical interest in German-Jewish writing, “‘German-Jewish literature’ as a descriptive category for a long time lacked a clear conceptual, terminological, and methodological foundation.” He points out the problems associated with a strictly biographical delineation. It might seem like an unproblematic method at first—“In order to determine the corpus of this literature, therefore, there would be little more to do than to compile a corresponding list of authors and works. [Um das Korpus dieser Literatur zu bestimmen, bliebe folglich nicht mehr zu tun, als eine entsprechende Autoren- und Werkliste zu erstellen.]”*! But the danger resides in the assumption that Jewish identity is objectifiable and visible as a literary feature, which potentially leads to the instrumentalization and disregard of aesthetic qualities.” The only ‘fact’ that can be determined and researched, according to Kilcher, is not an aspect of literature itself but the many variegated interpretations of and discourses about German-Jewish literature.°? I am however convinced that it is also valuable to scrutinize individual texts, since close reading uncovers a far more variegated palette of meanings and interpretations than a strict focus on the ideological or poetological positions of authors.

The interkulturelle Germanistik has encountered a similar problem in defining its object of investigation, as reflected by ongoing terminological confusion.** Over the years, literature from ‘non-ethnic’ German writers has been designated as Gastarbeiterliteratur,* which emphasizes the social position of the authors; Ausländerliteratur,’° which extends the scope beyond the realm of foreign workers; Migrantenliteratur, Migrationsliteratur,” ‘literature of migration,” and ‘literature of settlement,” which all reflect the authors’ recent German residence. Having gained currency in the course of the 1990s, the term ‘intercultural literature’ focuses on cultural exchanges within German society, acknowledging that, in a globalized, multiethnic, and multicultural society, cultural identities are not determined by a fixed set of features.

The evolving terminology at first seems to mirror a thematic transformation within this literature, which, broadly speaking, has exchanged its initially oppositional character for increasing aesthetic self-awareness. The changing terms, though, are also evidence of how this highly heterogeneous literature resists categorization, as well as challenges dominant concepts of identity and culture. Increasing awareness of how specific designations may reproduce power relations has contributed to a reluctance to fixate and determine the body of texts. This literature is now often received as a challenge to the concept of national identities as a form of writing after the dissolution of fixed national cultural concepts after the demise of the East/West power blocs, as a literature beyond the bourgeois concept with its background in nationalism and imperialism, as a literature that subverts the opposites of ‘foreign’ and ‘own, native and foreign, as a literature of hybridity and patchwork identities [...]. In other words, a literature that permits the experience of the illusion of a homogeneous cultural identity as well as of nonbipolar and hierarchical encounters with the foreign, articulates the foreign, and undermines the fixation of the foreign.

[als Form des Schreibens nach der Auflösung von festen nationalen Kulturbegriffen nach dem Ende der ost/westlichen Machtblöcke, als Literatur jenseits eines bürgerlichen Literaturbegriffs mit seinem Hintergrund in Nationalismus und Imperialismus, als Literatur, die die Gegensätze von ‘Fremd’ und ‘Eigen, Einheimischem und Fremdem unterläuft, als eine Literatur der Hybridität und der Patchwork-Identitäten [...]. Eine Literatur also, die zum einen die Illusion einer homogenen kulturellen Identität als auch nicht-bipolare und hierarchische Begegnungen mit dem Fremden erfahrbar macht, die Fremdheit artikuliert und die Festschreibung von Fremdheit unterläuft].*

However, that ‘intercultural’ focus—described above in terms of postcolonial hybridity and of a binary of Eigen- and Fremdheit—has yielded very different, even conflicting, interpretations. The study of ‘literature of migration’ has been the domain of two schools of thought.“ The German-based interkulturelle Germanistik has adopted a predominantly hermeneutic paradigm that ‘reads’ interculturality as an exchange between German and non-German cultures, and is founded on “the central principle of ‘understanding’ the foreign, of insight into the foreign culture [die leitende Idee eines ‘Verstehens’ des Fremden, einer Einfühlung in die fremde Kultur].’* In anglophone German studies, this literature is usually approached from postcolonial perspectives, which chart the social and political power relations represented or subverted by literature. They reject the notion of clearly defined cultural entities—and thus any distinction between eigen and fremd. Instead, the latter school of thought “attend[s] to the unsettling of all identities [...], and indeed see[s] any attribution of identity as essentializing and exclusive.“ The postcolonial perspective has gradually entered the scope of the German-based school,“ even if there remains some skepticism towards its method and concepts. Volker C. Dörr characterizes the gradual evolution towards the Anglo-American model as follows—by his own admission “overly trenchantly [überpointiert]”:

While in the 1980s it was still a question of how guest worker literature could assist its German reader in understanding a foreign culture from the (hierarchically higher) point of view of his own culture, and in doing so learn something about the foreign view of his ‘own’ culture— or possibly even through the foreign view about his own culture—today things are as complicated as they have ever been: The understanding that cultures are not self-contained homogeneous essences, ‘not completely isolated and compartmentalized entities; but rather that they are ‘reciprocal interactions of different, even antagonistic cultures and subcultures’ ‘within’ cultures, has become widely accepted.

[Ging es noch in den 1980er Jahren darum, wie Gastarbeiterliteratur ihrem deutschen Leser dabei helfen kann, eine fremde Kultur vom (hierarchisch höheren) Standpunkt seiner eigenen Kultur aus zu verstehen und dabei etwas über den fremden Blick auf seine ‘eigene’ Kultur zu erfahren—oder womöglich sogar durch den fremden Blick über seine eigene Kultur—, so gelten die Dinge heute als so kompliziert, wie sie wohl immer schon gewesen sind: Weitgehend durchgesetzt haben sich die Einsichten, dass Kulturen keine in sich abgeschlossenen homogenen Wesenheiten, “keine von einander völlig isolierten und sich abschottenden Gebilde sind,’ sondern dass es sich um ein “wechselseitiges Ineinanderwirken verschiedener, auch antagonistischer Kulturen und Teilkulturen” “in” den Kulturen handelt [...]].*

The skepticism of the Inlandsgermanistik towards concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘third space’ is possibly related to the idea that a (post)colonial paradigm does not entirely fit the German situation since the 1980s—and not just because the story of labor migration is not a colonial relation strictu senso.“ The reluctance can also be attributed to the fact that for a long time, Germany has not recognized its own status as a country of immigration—unlike for instance Canada and the United States, where the postcolonial approach has been long established as a valid method for describing minority writing.

Even though a postcolonial perspective has been embraced gradually by the interkulturelle Germanistik, Dörr formulates a crucial reservation about the way it has been applied, pointing out that the concept of hybridity itself may be vulnerable to re-essentialization. Homi K. Bhabha emphasizes that “the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third space emerges,’ and that hybridity itself is “the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge.”” Hybridity is, in other words, not the mixed result of two pre-existing substances. However, the concept has often been applied that way, leading to an inadvertent but problematic sequence:

And so, implicitly, the idea returns that the source of the hybrid culture consists of two cultures as self-contained homogeneous entities. The notion of hybridity thus leads to (re-)essentializations. [...] It also leads to the re-essentialization of the hybrid third itself, for the hybrid is by no means always understood in a differential way [...]. The special thing about German-Turkish migrants, then, is not just that their culture is a mixture of ‘the’ German and ‘the’ Turkish; there is also ‘the’ hybrid migrant culture.

[[U]nausgesprochen kehrt dann die Vorstellung wieder, dasjenige, aus dem die eine hybride Kultur gemischt sei, seien eben doch zwei Kulturen als in sich abgeschlossene homogene Wesenheiten. Die Vorstellung der Hybridität verleitet also zu (Re-) Essentialisierungen. [...] Sie verleitet auch zur Re-Essentialisierung des hybriden Dritten selbst, denn keineswegs immer wird das Hybride dann differentiell verstanden [...]. Dann erscheint als das Besondere etwa der deutsch-türkischen Migranten nicht nur, dass ihre Kultur aus ‘dem’ Deutschen und ‘dem’ Türkischen gemischt ist; es gibt dann auch gleich ‘die’ hybride Migrantenkultur.]*°