Introduction
‘I always felt as if I came from Turkey’, Elias Canetti states in the first part of his autobiography The Tongue Set Free.Reference Canetti2 Canetti’s father originated from Edirne and Canetti held a Turkish passport up until the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.3 Canetti is therefore a writer of Turkish origin. Why has he never been discussed as a Turkish migrant writer? On the one hand, his background does not play a role in his literary works. Canetti accepted the international literary hierarchies of his time and used them to his own advantage before he was forced to go into exile. He moved to Vienna, the centre of Central and Eastern European writing at the beginning of the twentieth century to become a writer and drew on Western and particularly German-speaking literary traditions to reach this aim. In other words, he wrote himself into a literary tradition that facilitated his becoming an internationally-known writer, an endeavour that would have been far more difficult to achieve in peripheral languages and emerging literary traditions.Reference Casanova4 On the other hand, Canetti was easily accepted as a German writer in a literary field made up of writers who originated from all over the Habsburg Empire. Hermann Broch introduced Canetti at a reading from his first novel Die Blendung (Autodafé) in Vienna in 1933 as follows: ‘Elias Canetti was born in Rustschuk, Bulgaria in 1905, he is Sephardic, his mother tongue is Spanish, but that does not prevent him from being a German poet.’Reference Broch5 It was only in the 1970s that Canetti returned to his roots in his autobiography, a time when migration was becoming a growing public concern in Europe and when it first became an issue in European literatures.
Canetti’s example shows that a writer’s origin and mother tongue have not always been relevant categories in the writing and reception of literature originating from Turkey. However, they have increasingly become so in a literary world neatly divided into predominantly monolingual national literary traditions, where being born into the language in question is regarded as a precondition for becoming a writer.Reference Yildiz6 This was the case when migrants originating from Turkey, who have come to Europe in growing numbers since the 1960s, began to write in their host countries. Unlike Canetti, they came from a country that had – since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 – invested heavily in establishing a Turkish monolingual literary tradition based on Western models – a project that was detrimental to literatures in other languages thriving in this area, such as the Kurdish one, and to an emerging socialist internationalist literary tradition embodied in authors such as Nâzim Hikmet. Unlike Canetti, these post-1945 migrant writers entered countries where this model of the monolingual national literary tradition was firmly established and were thus not easily accepted, regardless of whether they wrote in their mother tongue or in the literary language of their host literary fields. Moreover, they did not necessarily fully adapt to the Western traditions governing their host literary fields, but introduced literary traditions barely known, let alone recognised in these literary centres. In other words, they challenged the invisibility of literary traditions discarded as peripheral and thus not noteworthy in Western Europe. At the same time, recognition in Turkey was also not a given, especially for those drawing on literary traditions repressed in Turkey, as is the case with the authors discussed in more detail below. Under such circumstances, it seems astounding that post-war Turkish migration to Europe has resulted in any recognised literary publications at all. In the following, I will argue that the emergence, publication and recognition of this literature strongly depended on facilitating conditions in the literary fields where Turkish migrants began to write.7 These conditions have in turn had a major impact on what kind of writing found recognition in which context. I will discuss two examples: Kurdish diaspora literature8 in Sweden using the example of Mehmed Uzun and socialist internationalist literature in West Germany with the example of Aras Ören. However, before turning to literature, I will provide a brief insight into the migration histories of the two countries in question.
Migration Histories
The histories of Turkish migration to the Federal Republic of Germany and Sweden are comparable in many respects. Both countries began to attract Turkish migrants in the wake of the economic boom of the 1950s, which led to labour shortages in many Western European economies. West Germany signed a labour recruitment agreement with Turkey to address these labour shortages in 1961, Sweden followed in 1964. However, the number of Turkish labourers leaving for Sweden was low in comparison to the numbers attracted to West Germany where Turkish workers had become the largest group of foreign origin by the time recruitment was banned in 1973. Even though the German government introduced labour market regulations aimed at pushing the workers to leave, many Turkish workers stayed and were joined by their families in the following years. At around the same time, Sweden began to receive Kurdish refugees fleeing repression in Turkey. Kurds had also gone to the Federal Republic of Germany as part of the Turkish labour migration. Some also came as refugees around 1980 even though they did not necessarily register as such, using other entry channels available to them, such as visa or family reunification.Reference Içduygu9 Altogether Turkish immigrants and their descendants form a much smaller group in Sweden than in Germany. In 2013, 46,000 Swedish inhabitants were born in Turkey (=3% of the foreign-born population), compared to one million German inhabitants (=16% of the foreign-born population).10 The number of Kurds included in these numbers is unclear, but estimates imply that the proportion of Kurds is higher in Sweden (40,000–50,000 Kurds) than in Germany (600,000–650,000 Kurds).11 The comparatively large significance of Kurdish refugee migration to Sweden of course partly explains the emergence of a Kurdish literature in Sweden. At the same time, these minor differences in the migration histories do not explain why Kurdish literature is a marginal phenomenon in Germany, where the Kurdish community is far bigger and equally politicised. Such differences are linked to the different opportunities provided in the host literary fields.
Kurdish Literature in Sweden
That Kurdish literature emerged in Sweden rather than in West Germany is linked to the multicultural policies introduced as a response to growing migration in the 1970s. As early as 1975, the Swedish government implemented equality, freedom of choice and cooperation as principles for the integration of immigrants into Swedish society. These principles implied equal access to all resources for immigrants in Sweden, equal opportunities with regard to the preservation and development of their languages, equal support for cultural activities, freedom of choice with regard to the degree of integration and the maintenance of linguistic and cultural ties, as well as co-operation in social and political issues based on equal participation. Following these principles, Swedish schools began to offer mother tongue teaching in 1977. Kurdish has since become one of the ten most important languages of the 60 languages taught. The Swedish integration principles also imply that Kurdish publishing houses and journals, as well as Kurdish authors, have the same access to public funding as their Swedish counterparts. The first Kurdish publishing houses were established in Sweden in the 1970s, but the first important publishers date from the 1980s. Scalbert-Yücel counted 29 Kurdish publishing houses in Sweden in the early 2000s. Most of these had profited at least once from Swedish subsidies for individual publications. Moreover, Kurdish authors have been granted funds to support writing periods of one to five years.Reference Scalbert-Yücel12
These policies expedited the emergence of a Kurdish diaspora in Sweden, particularly pushed by Kurds originating from Turkey where they had been repressed since the foundation of the Turkish Republic. In 1923, the use of the Kurdish language was banned, a regulation applied more strictly since the military coup in 1980. This policy went hand-in-hand with a depreciation of Kurdish culture and identity. Only in the course of the 1990s were these restrictive policies towards the Kurdish population slowly being dismantled.Reference Scalbert-Yücel13 Kurdish language classes in Sweden transmitted knowledge of the Kurdish language and of a culture repressed in Turkey. The same holds true for many Kurdish literary works published in Sweden. Mehmed Uzun, a Kurdish political activist who fled from persecution in Turkey to Sweden in 1977, shall serve as an example here. Starting his writing career in Sweden, Uzun has since become known as the inventor of the Kurdish novel in Turkey. He wrote seven novels and a volume of poetry before his death in 2006. Many of his works focus on historical figures of the Kurdish movement, thus constructing a Kurdish collective memory. In addition, he wrote Kurdish literature into world literature: ‘I tried to write those pages as a world citizen and a Kurd and thus establish a bridge between my language and the world.’Reference Uzun14 The following brief analysis of his novel Siya Evînê (Shadow of Love), first published in Stockholm in 1989, will serve to prove these points.
Siya Evînê deals with a Kurdish movement called Xoybûn (the Kurmanci term for existence) which was founded in 1927 to counter the repression of the Kurdish population in the newly-established Turkish republic. The movement was the intellectual arm of the Ararat rebellion that led to the foundation of the short-lived Kurdish Republic of Ararat. Reminiscent of the Kurdish epic tradition cited several times in the text and also extensively discussed by Uzun in his Introduction to Kurdish Literature,Reference Uzun15 the novel focuses on the personal struggle of the leader of Xoybûn, Memduh Selîm, between his political responsibility for the Kurdish movement and his deep longing for love, a family and a home, embodied by his fiancée Ferîha. In the end, Selîm loses both the struggle for Kurdish freedom and his fiancée. However, the couple are reunited in an imagined, peaceful Kurdistan in a vision the protagonist has whilst drawing his last breath. This vision of a better future underlies the whole novel. Indeed, the author stresses the novel’s specific force to create visions overcoming crude reality, in this case the reality of the protagonist losing his fiancée: ‘Unfortunately, Memduh Selîm is not a writer. Otherwise he would write a novel about love, a novel, in which the lovers are united and happy.’Reference Uzun16 This is exactly what Uzun does in this novel not only with regard to Selîm’s love, but also with regard to his struggle for a recognised Kurdish language, culture and identity. The novel contributes to the creation of a Kurdish collective memory and a vision of a better future, a vision that Uzun was only able to develop in exile: ‘For the first time, I considered my fragmented country as an entity with a colorful mosaic. I established with it above and beyond the cold, crude, political and ideological jargon, a humane relationship. I decorated the pages I wrote in the cold winter nights of Stockholm with its invisible shadows.’Reference Uzun14 In this vein, the whole text stresses the importance of books in creating the Kurdish imaginary community, to use Benedict Anderson’s term: ‘Was it not through books that he learned who he was, who his predecessors, the Medes, the Karduchs, the Kurds were?’ (Ref. 16, p. 98). Moreover, it justifies the Kurdish right for their language and culture to be recognised with a literary tradition on a par with similar traditions in Western Europe, the cradle of nationhood. Memduh Selîm frequently lists authors of the books he owns. All of these lists juxtapose well-known Western European authors, central to world literature since the nineteenth century, with Persian and Kurdish writers: ‘[…] books by Ehmedê Xanî, Firdewsî, Omar Chajjam, Montaigne, Descartes, La Fayette, Rousseau, Shakespeare and Voltaire’ (Ref. 16, p. 27). By placing the Kurdish seventeenth century writer Ehmedê Xanî, who is well-known for his love drama Mem û Zîn, alongside Shakespeare and Voltaire, the novel inscribes Kurdish literature into the pantheon of world literature. This serves not only to increase the visibility and knowledge of Kurdish literature in the world, it is also a call for the recognition of the Kurdish language and culture.
As already mentioned, Uzun is one of the most famous contemporary Kurdish writers. Indeed, Kurdish diaspora writers in Sweden have been very important for the emergence of Kurdish literature in Turkey after the ban on the Kurdish language was relaxed in 1991. Their works, originally published in Sweden and prohibited in Turkey, were re-edited in Turkey immediately after the ban was relaxed. They inspired a younger generation of authors emerging over the last two decades in Turkey.Reference Scalbert-Yücel12 However, this process has not been without backlash; Uzun and his publisher, Hasan Öztoprak, have been accused several times of endangering state security in Turkey at the beginning of this century. Uzun has also left his mark in Sweden. He was a member of the Swedish writers association and has won several Swedish awards. However, only four of his works have been translated into Swedish and only since 1998.17 Moreover, unlike the literature emerging from Turkish migration to Germany, his works in no way questioned the concepts underlying Swedish national literature. Kurdish literature in Sweden, like other diaspora literatures subsidised by the Swedish state, was never regarded as an integral part of Swedish literature, but rather as a separate national, ethnic and cultural tradition: ‘critics frequently strove to anchor these writers in their “original cultural milieu” by comparing them with other writers of similar national, regional, or ethnic background, or by reading their works in the context of the historical, political and social conditions in “the country of origin”’.Reference Nilsson18 These strictly national divisions of literature only began to be challenged in the 2000s when a growing number of migrant writers began to write in Swedish. A multicultural and multilingual integration policy, which has inspired a rich tradition of diaspora writing in Sweden, has long upheld the myth of monolingual national literary traditions and prevented the questioning of national literary ideologies initiated by the emergence of a socialist internationalist literature in West Germany.
Socialist Internationalist Literature in West Germany
Kurdish diaspora literature has also emerged in West Germany. Authors are however few and far between and have found less recognition than their Swedish counterparts, both in their country of settlement and in their country of origin. The author Hemreş Reşo, who left Turkey for West Germany in 1963 and lived there until his death in 2003, identified the late and slow introduction of Kurdish language courses in German schools as one of the reasons for the lack of Kurdish writing in Germany.Reference Hama Tschawisch19 Kurdish language courses were only slowly being introduced into German schools in the 1990s, while Turkish had been taught since the 1970s. As a consequence, Kurds have continued to hide their mother tongue and minority identity, pretending that their first language was Turkish, as they had been forced to do in Turkey.Reference Brizić20 Under such circumstances, it is far more difficult to say ‘We are Kurds’ than in Sweden, as Reşo put it, let alone to write in Kurdish about Kurdish history.
Nevertheless, Turkish migration has had a more pronounced impact on German than on Swedish literary developments. Researchers speak of a ‘Turkish turn in contemporary German literature’, arguing that Turkish migration to the Federal Republic of Germany has changed the understanding of what it means to be German ‘en route to a future that Germans and the Turks among them will most certainly share’.Reference Adelson21 Many literary works have emerged from Turkish migration since the early 1970s when writers, such as Aras Ören and Güney Dal who had begun to write in Turkey, continued their writing careers in West-Berlin. However, unlike in Sweden, the emergence of migrant writing in West Germany was not due to an opening of cultural funding, which was long reserved to German citizens, rather it was due to wider changes in the West German literary field, linked to the emergence of a New Left in the 1960s and 1970s.Reference Sievers22 First and foremost, these left-wing movements were an international phenomenon linking activists across national borders from the United States via West Germany and France to Turkey, as Emine Sevgi Özdamar illustrates in her novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn), first published in 1998. Such contacts certainly facilitated the publication of Turkish left-wing writing in West Germany. Moreover, the emergence of a New Left also transformed literary preferences. Beginning in the wake of a crisis in mining in the Ruhr area in the early 1960s, a group of authors, journalists and critics reawakened the tradition of a German workers’ literature, which was particularly pushed by the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt (Workshop Circle for Literature on the World of Work) established in 1970. The New Left also brought the first German films and publications dealing with post-war labour migration from an anti-capitalist perspective, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Katzelmacher or Günter Wallraff’s book of reportage Bilder aus Deutschland (Images from Germany), both issued in 1969.Reference Chin23 Last but not least, the New Left founded new publishing houses – such as Rotbuch – which aimed to establish an alternative public. These developments opened up publishing opportunities for writers of Turkish origin whose texts focused on worker solidarity in a fight against international capitalism. Aras Ören’s Was will Niyazi in der Naunystraße? (What does Niyazi want in Naunyn Street?) serves as an example here.
Born in Istanbul, Aras Ören had been publishing literary works in Istanbul since 1960. He first came to West Germany in the early 1960s as part of a theatre collective performing in Frankfurt and after several return journeys finally settled in West Berlin in 1969. Only one year later, he published a volume of poetry translated into German. Wider recognition in West Germany ensued with the narrative poem Was will Niyazi in der Naunystraße?, also written originally in Turkish, but first published by Rotbuch in German in 1973 and turned into a film the same year by the West Berlin radio and television station Sender Freies Berlin. This literary work departs from the same anti-capitalist spirit as the contemporary works by Fassbinder and Wallraff. As such, it fits well into Rotbuch’s publishing profile, which included works on the history of the class struggle, Marx and Engels, as well as poems, stories and essays by German left-wing writers, such as F.C. Delius and Peter Schneider. However, Ören’s approach is more international than that of his German contemporaries. It shows a deep knowledge of both Germany and Turkey, not only in terms of the historical and contemporary content of his narrative poem, but also in terms of the literary traditions to which the text alludes. It is this knowledge of both worlds – a structural advantage of those born in the literary peripheriesReference Casanova4 – that made the text such a success. It was hailed as ‘the first literary work by a Turk to explain why the guest workers had come to West Germany, what they had experienced, how they had survived’ and as ‘an extension of the New Left’s critique of capitalist society to include “all the Niyazis in all the Naunynstraßes”’.Reference Chin23
Set in the Naunyn Street in Berlin Kreuzberg, a receiving area of labour migrants since the nineteenth century, Was will Niyazi in der Naunystraße? uses the individual stories of Frau Kutzer and Niyazi Gümüsciliç, amongst others, to uncover the parallels in the lives of labour migrants coming from Eastern Prussia in the late nineteenth century and from Turkey in the second half of the twentieth century. Both protagonists are introduced as suffering from the cold winter in the first paragraphs of the text, in contrast to those living in the south-western part of Berlin whose villas are kept warm by Niyazi’s work.Reference Ören24 The parallels in their stories continue: they both suffer from capitalist exploitation, dream of better lives and, last but not least, experience and partly propagate communist resistance. Ören also tells the parallel stories of such resistance being repressed in Germany and in Turkey. Here Atifet’s story highlights that this repression continues in Turkey up to the time of the writing of the poem. Her son was killed in a demonstration against capitalism in 1966, one year before Benno Ohnesorg died in a demonstration against the Shah in Berlin. Moreover, Ören does not ignore that worker solidarity may be undermined by ethnic differences, in particular the hatred of foreigners in Germany. Nevertheless, his text ends with a utopian scene of joint activism uniting workers of all origins against capitalist exploitation: ‘And the Naunyn street/is again a street where something is stirring./[…] workers, Naunyn street inhabitants drinking beer,/discussing politics,/under the same flag, head to head’ (Ref. 24, p. 62).
Ören clearly draws on Brecht’s epic theatre that was meant to make his audience change the world, but unlike Brecht, he does not combine epic and dramatic, rather epic and poetic forms in a narrative poem reminiscent of Nâzim Hikmet’s works. Hikmet was virtually unknown in Germany at the time and therefore an ideal point of departure for a ‘foreignising’ device in the Brechtian sense. The poetic form defies the reader’s demand for identification with the characters and their stories with a view to focusing their attention on the underlying structures of capitalist exploitation that could then serve as a motivation for joint resistance. Ören’s early work initiated a tradition continued by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, the first Turkish migrant writer to win the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Not only does Özdamar’s work also heavily draw on Brecht, but she also continues Ören’s project of telling the story of the repression of the left in Turkey in her short story Mutterzunge (Mother Tongue)Reference Yildiz6 published in 1990 and in her above-mentioned novel The Bridge of the Golden Horn. Unlike Ören in his early work, however, Özdamar does not call for communist activism, but challenges the national imposition of monolingual and univocal identities both in Germany and in Turkey in her works written in a German estranged by expressions directly translated from Turkish. Özdamar’s works were amongst the first to inspire interpretations of Turkish migrant writing challenging the understanding of what it means to be German. However, Ören had claimed this right to change German society before any of Özdamar’s literary works had been published in an interview carried out in 1986: ‘We are forcing ourselves into the living rooms of the Germans – something that is good and important. We have been living here for a quarter of a century, closely connected to this society. This society has changed us enormously and we also have the right to change this society, with our habits, our culture and our aesthetic manifestations. And if this society does not accept us, then we have to invade their living rooms with all artistic means, sometimes also using artifice.’Reference Ören25
Conclusion: Unrelated Stories?
The above has illustrated the pronounced impact of the receiving context on the emergence, publication and reception of Turkish migrant writers in different European contexts. Multicultural, and in particular multilingual, public policies in Sweden have facilitated the emergence of a Kurdish diaspora literature; this then became a major impetus for the emergence of a Kurdish literature in Turkey when it was finally possible to write and publish in Kurdish there in the 1990s. The emergence of the New Left in West Germany reflected in a new workers’ literature and new left-wing publishing houses in the German literary field has provided publishing opportunities for Turkish migrant writers influenced by a socialist internationalist tradition in the 1970s. These works laid the foundation for a literary tradition that has since come to be regarded as having changed the understanding of what it means to be German.
These two stories seem unrelated to such an extent that we may wonder why their comparison is of any interest, beyond the simple fact that both groups of authors originate from Turkey. First of all, they clearly illustrate how strongly writers’ individual positionings and recognition depend on the possibilities open to them in their literary fields. There would most certainly have been enough individual potential for a Kurdish literature to emerge in West Germany, but unlike in Sweden the political and literary developments in Germany at the time prevented the emergence of such a nationalist literature and were instead conducive to an internationalist anti-capitalist literature. Second, the Swedish case clearly shows that migration alone does not suffice to inspire literary texts moving beyond national cultures and identities, as recent approaches have tended to make us believe.Reference Bhabha26 They may just as well inspire the creation of new imaginary communities in literary texts, a trend that has been neglected in academic writing over the last two decades due to the strong focus on migrant literatures overcoming ethnic and national boundaries. However, the two trends are not unrelated. Both Kurds and left-wing activists have suffered from repression in Turkey. For many of them this repression was one of the reasons to leave the country and to continue their fight against this repression abroad where it was possible to make their ideas heard. The recognition of both would imply a diversification of Turkish culture.
Acknowledgements
This article is partly based on research carried out in the project Literature on the Move funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). I would like to thank my colleagues Holger Englerth and Silke Schwaiger, as well as the co-editor of this volume, Justin Stagl, for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. Any remaining errors and inconsistencies are, of course, mine.
Wiebke Sievers is a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her research focuses on migration and culture, literary sociology and translation. Recent publications include a co-edited special issue of the journal Migration Letters on Turkish migrants and their descendants in Austria; a co-edited volume on Migration from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe; and several articles on migrant writing. Wiebke Sievers coordinates the three-year project Literature on the Move dealing with migration and literature in Austria. She is also currently co-editing a volume comparing the emergence and discussion of migrant writing in 14 contexts.
