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By Leslie A. Adelson (auth.)

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Extra info for The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration

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A young soldier in the German Wehrmacht in 1944, another story line has it, Alexander’s father was sent to “certain death” at the front for having criticized Hitler “too loudly” (206). Alexander’s speech problem is a tangled web of personal and institutionalized trauma, grief, shame, and accountability. The inaugural dialogue with migrant laborers is to be located within this web, and Alexander’s affective investment in “the Turkish conversations on the train” is central to the story that Selim has to tell.

Prime examples of this involve Turkish migration and the Holocaust, the Cold War, European modernity, or the Armenian genocide. The proposed interpretations of such touching tales move beyond political, social, or historical analogy to address aesthetic innovations that reframe German and transnational pasts, presents, and futures from the vantage of the 1990s. How are we to read the literature of migration if familiar points of reference (such as Turks, the Holocaust, or the Cold War) are unsettled by the disorienting web of cultural narratives in which they serve as points of reference for interpretive and historical orientation alike?

In the late twentieth century Hans-Georg Gadamer’s influential philosophy of hermeneutics emphasized historical understanding as a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) in this sense. At the intersection of literary studies and ethnic studies, Doris Sommer has articulated the most sustained and impassioned critique of hermeneutic models of understanding from the vantage of minority writing and bilingual literary games in the Americas (1999, 2003, 2004). Charging Gadamer with treating rhetoric as “always a bridge” to understanding through dialogue and fusion (1999: 25), Sommer proposes a negative hermeneutic focusing on impediments to understanding that must be acknowledged and respected before any genuinely cross-cultural dialogue can occur.

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