Writing about the literature of the 'Ruhr-Pott' is a multi-dimensional business but it has one particularly prominent blind spot. This blind spot runs right through the whole history of literary and cultural studies. It runs through the writing of the cultural history both of the region and of a city such as Duisburg. If you take a look in the bookshops, at the street names, the theatre’s repertoire leaflets, the diaries of events at city libraries – wherever you look – you see nothing. It seems the literature written by immigrants from Turkey has had no notable effect on the writing of the region’s history: at least no effect that has been represented within cultural or literary history. However, there are numerous works by authors from the Ruhr region who combine the cultural histories of Germany and Turkey in their own biographies.

When Orhan Pamuk visited Essen in 2017 as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was unwilling to let his reading at the Lichtburg finish without speaking about Duisburg and its Turkish exiles. Pamuk regularly came to Duisburg as an unknown author in the 1980s on reading tours that were organised by Turkish exiles. What is Pamuk talking about?

First Generation
Duisburg as a territory for work

The 1970s in Duisburg were characterised by industrialisation, the high pressure flames of the blast furnaces and the Turkish settlements – the türkmahalle. In 1980 more Turks lived here than in any other city in the Ruhr region. “The Kurds living in Duisburg are registered as Turks,” one official information leaflet records. In addition to migrant workers and their families, numerous exiles from Turkey settled in Duisburg. For example: Fakir Baykurt. At the time Baykurt was already a heavyweight of socialist literature and above all the village literature that represented the enlightenment and education of an Anatolian humanist educated elite within Turkey. Baykurt’s literary territory was the people of Anatolia and of the Ruhr region: socialist realism on the route of economic migration.

Baykurt lived in Duisburg from 1979 and was the most prominent of the Ruhr region’s authors writing in Turkish in the 1980s. He wrote a Duisburg trilogy Yüksek Fırınlar (Blast Furnace), 1983, Koca Ren (Mighty Rhine), 1986, Yarım Ekmek (Half a Loaf), 1998, as well as numerous short stories about the Ruhr region. In 1986 Baykurt founded the working group Kuzey Ren Vestfalya Türkiyeli Yazarlar Çalışma Grubu (Turkish Writers in North Rhine-Westphalia). This was Baykurt sending a message, that literature is 1) a medium of cultural life and bearing witness to one’s time and 2) a means of participation in and a basic right of civil society.

On an institutional level the Fakir Baykurt Prize for Culture awarded by the City of Duisburg and introduced in 2014 and the naming of the Fakir-Baykurt-Platz in Duisburg Homberg can be seen as significant results of cultural exchange and influence. However, the Fakir-Baykurt-Platz, which is a car park, turns out to be the source of numerous irritations. A car park outside a shopping centre has been named after an internationally active socialist literary figure who spent his life devoted far more to education than to consumption.

Territory, interpretation and irritation: Baykurt spent up to twenty years writing about the people of the Ruhr region and yet in 2019 he still does not receive sufficient recognition as part of the Ruhr’s regional literature or at least part of its engagement with the form of ‘literary regionalism’. In the works that he wrote in Germany he shows an intense interest in the historical responsibility of post-war German society, which has so far played no part in the reception of Baykurt in Turkey and has encouraged the “blind spot” mentioned above from a Turkish viewpoint. Baykurt began by writing about the territory of Turkey, about Anatolian humanism and ended up with immigrants in Duisburg.

First Generation for everyone
Picture book miners in hell

At the beginning of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s career all manner of people argued about whether she belonged to German or Turkish literature. Extracts from her first novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei – hat zwei Türen – aus einer kam ich rein – aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a Caravanseri – with Two Doors – I Came in One – and Went Out of the Other), that was published in1992, won her the 1991 Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize. Her collection of stories Mutterzunge (Mother Tongue) from 1999 brought together four stories that seem like milestones of literature that lies between Germany and Turkey: Mutterzunge (Mother Tongue), Großvaterzunge (Grandfather Tongue,) the stage play written in prose Karagöz in Alamania (Karagöz in Germany) and Karriere einer Putzfrau. Erinnerungen an Deutschland (Career of a Cleaning Woman. Memories of Germany).

Özdamar’s themes are theatre stages and world literature between Germany and Turkey. She reacts to the issues associated with them by also writing about collective guilt and the responsibility and freedom of the individual. Her characters are either located in Germany, in Turkey or in surreal places like the “whore train” on the way to Europe or beside the pool of tears in a half-burnt forest that turns out to be the territory of German guilt.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar wrote Perikızı – Ein Traumspiel (Perikızı – A Dreamplay) retelling Homer’s heroic epic The Odyssey as a commission for RUHR.2010 at the request of the Artistic Director of Schlosstheater Moers, Ulrich Greb. Özdamar’s Ruhr Odyssee Europa bears the main features of her Bildungsroman Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn), published in 1998, as well as those of her story Das Mädchen aus dem halb verbrannten Wald (The Girl From the Half-Burnt Forest), published in 2007, and represents a new treatment of Homer’s text: Özdamar reverses the relationship between the sexes by making the classically male hero of her saga a fairy girl. Özdamar’s text is reminiscent in style of the new high culture of René Pollesch and Christoph Schlingensief, who deconstruct the aura of classical texts and place them in a brutal context of individuality and illusion. By doing this the universal framework within which the characters operate contemporises both surreal and highly poetic moments that seem like descriptions of states that are half real and half unreal.

The dreamplay starts with its longest chapter “The sea rises, who knows why. Perikızı’s awakening” set in Istanbul at the time when the Turkish republic was founded and tells the story of the fairy girl Perikızı, who is infatuated with the theatre and wishes to travel to Europe. Özdamar introduces Perikızı’s lamenting grandmother as early as the second page. While Perikızı takes on her grandmother’s perspective with an eye witness account that brings the First World War and the mourning for the murder and expulsion from Anatolia from the viewpoint of the Armenian dead into the present, her parents sit in the cinema and watch the film Gone With the Wind.

This is followed by her journey to Europe in the “whore train” through war-torn and traumatised Yugoslavia and later on to the Ruhr region. Özdamar adds stage directions on the “Ruhrpott dialect”. The exemplary “German and Turkish picture book miners” climb out of hell and – according to Özdamar’s stage directions – should assume the Ruhrpott dialect of the comedian Jürgen von Manger and his Ruhr character Adolf Tegtmeier and recite the original text of The Odyssey, specifically the episode “Is Odysseys allowed home?”. In Özdamar’s case the construction of the Ruhr region as the location for this odyssey is based not on the territory of the region but carries specific features of the Ruhr region into the characters of “German and Turkish picture book miners”.

Özdamar uses many fairy-tale characters to depict the complex web and many levels of political violence in the two states. By becoming nobody, being nothing and being overlooked it is possible to avoid the dangers that appear to lurk in Europe. Memory plays a challenging role here: it is lacking! Özdamar attests to hollow connections between the historical reconstructions of these “giants of guilty feelings”. The “giants of guilty feelings”, the “whipping nationalist chickens” and the Turkish interpreter have no memory – just as little as the rhizomatic Ruhr region. As a result the individual in Özdamar’s dreamplay is liable to fall apart. For Ödzamar the issue of the individual is linked to processing crimes of violence and genocide. Memory is no longer an original sin and a guilt that must be borne but a condition for the survival of every single person.

Next Generation
The Map is not the Territory

The familiar phrase 'The Map is not the Territory' is very helpful in the context of the Ruhr region and the literature and culture of its immigrants from Turkey: the map or the written and visible, established history of the territory is not the one that is actually present – which would leave us with blind spots once again.

But is it not the case that revealing the gaps, blind spots and unwritten histories relating to immigrants and their descendants is problematic on several levels? Does this not give expression to a conflict in which it is assumed that the 'typical German reader' is ignorant of and lacks access to the narratives of authors such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Fakir Baykurt, Yaşar Kemal and Kemal Yalçın – to name only a few? Do academics and students and the decendants of immigrants not count as 'typical German readers'? The assumption that 'normal German readers' would not be familiar with the migrant perspective claims that the migrant perspective is not the rule but the exception. This assumption is based on the unspoken claim that bilingual academics and readers are not 'normal German' recipients. Is this not where the reason for the lack of visibility, lack of analysis and inclusion of these texts and authors lies? What about the right to preserve values? Does this right vanish as soon as German citizenship has been attained? Should the descendants of immigrants from Turkey who live in the Ruhr region tell their story and preserve it themselves?

As early as 2001 the American scholar of German literature Leslie A. Adelson pointed out the necessity of a change and transformation in the interpretation of the stories of writers from Turkey and their literature in Germany in her manifesto Against Between. What does this mean exactly? And why does simply naming the demand to be not only in between but at the heart of things cause outrage to the point of visible panic? Adelson talks of a potential Federal German transnational basis analogous to the way these and similar processes are described in Kader Konuk’s Identities in Process, published in 2001, and Azade Seyhans Writing Outside the Nation, published in 2001. In her book The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration, 2005, Leslie A. Adelson describes these developments as the 'Turkish Turn'.

While academic research in the USA attempts to portray the 'Turkish Turn' as a necessary change and has received considerable attention and respect, no comparable change of perspective can be found in the study of culture or German literature in Germany itself. Within the reception of literature of the Ruhr region there is not a single analysis that does not refer to a 'migrant literature' co-existing alongside a homogenous literature that is not influenced by migration. At the same time almost all studies of the literary landscape in the Ruhr region promise to reveal a literary landscape that is culturally and linguistically diverse. Partial mention is made of Fakir Baykurt and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, though there is a complete lack of any knowledge that embeds them in the Turkish context. This is telling because Özdamar and Baykurt in particular are equally concerned with both Turkish and German cultural history. The border of literary belonging is not one of territory, it is not even one of language, but the absence of any belief that the narratives of immigrants are part of a region and that therefore when the subject is migration a separate story is not being told, but a literary and cultural history which is part of a broader community of memory.