Where Here Begins - David Jennings Gramling

AbstractWhere Here Begins: Monolingualism and the Spatial ImaginationbyDavid Jennings GramlingDoctor of Philosophy in GermanUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Deniz Göktürk, ChairThis dissertation argues that twentieth-century multilingual authors writing in dominantlanguages engaged in a poetics of aesthetic constraint, rather than a process of culturalassimilation. The historically disparate, yet critically kindred texts I consider—those ofFranz Kafka, Primo Levi, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Orhan Pamuk—translate theirauthors’ multilingual dilemma into spatial figurations—whether in the form of uncanny“other rooms” and inaccessible castles in Kafka; indecipherable and distant utterancesin Levi; an inn with two doors in Özdamar; or an “identityless” modern library inPamuk. In foregrounding spatial relations that allegorize the multilingual world beyondthe constraints of Western Europe’s (national) literary traditions, these texts potentlycritique the limits of monolingual epistemology in the modern German context.Were cultural identity the implied concept linking these authors, Primo Levi andEmine Sevgi Özdamar might appear an odd pairing for analysis. Even the assertion of atextual kinship between Primo Levi and Franz Kafka based on their relativeJewishness—or one between Özdamar and Pamuk based on their Turkishness—would1

present all the problems of reductive identarianism. The constellation of texts I havechosen here is rich for conceptualization precisely because it does not rely on sharedbackground and heritage—but rather on a common double-bind with monolingualism inthe German twentieth century. From the Jewish German Kafka to the Turkish GermanÖzdamar, from the Italian Levi to the Turkish Pamuk, what remains salient is aproductive irreconcilability between the multilingualism of their narrative worlds andthe monolingualism of their texts. Whether in Kafka’s anxious travelers, Levi’scomrades at Birkenau, Özdamar’s itinerant lyricists, or Pamuk’s disoriented poet Ka—each strives to signal how linguistic plurality is in a passionate conflict of interest withtwentieth century literary norms.If we may speak of a linguistic lineage among these texts, it is therefore one ofadverse positioning within the modern project of (linguistic) nation-building. Each ofthese authors draws on subjugated linguistic sources to which their respective impliedreaderships do not and cannot have adequate access, given the meta-formal constraintsof monolingual writing. Whether Yiddish, Czech, and Hebrew for Kafka, camplanguage [lagerzspracha] for Levi, or Turkish and Ottoman for Özdamar and Pamuk,the linguistic Other remains menacingly sequestered in the spatial landscapes of thesetexts. This basic asymmetry between monolingual text and multilingual hypotext givessuch prose experiments as Kafka’s The Missing Person (1914) and The Castle (1924),Özdamar’s Life is a Caravanserai (1994) and Pamuk’s Snow (2002) their lateral,horizontal structure and their air of unfinishability.Resulting from this research are a number of conceptual hypotheses aboutmonolingualism in the domain of literary studies: 1) that monolingualism remains an2

unmarked critical category, as whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity once were,and is in need of a parallel critical conceptualization, 2) that monolingualism and “thenative speaker” are inventions of early modern Europe, 3) that being multilingual is anepistemic and social position, as opposed to a set of acquired proficiencies—in otherwords, that multilingualism is differential, rather than additive, 4) that manifest codeswitchingand language-mixing are not the only proper domain for literary inquiry aboutmultilingualism, and that monolingual texts can be imminent—even from a formalistperspective—with an awareness (or apprehension) of neighboring languages, and 5) thatone of the greatest challenges for literary history and German Studies in the twenty-firstcentury will be to conceptualize monolingualism as it relates to culture, text, andprevalent theoretical traditions.In future writings, I will supplement this dissertation with research on the followingquestions: to what extent were post-structuralism, formalism, New Criticism, and NewHistoricism—not to mention the “New Formalism”—motivated by dilemmas of, orapprehensions about, multilingual subjectivity? How does gender identity parallel orundermine monolingualism? How can film history—with its enduring debates aboutsynchronization, dubbing, accents, and authentic representation—offer a fruitfulcounter-context for a nascent discourse about literary multilingualism? How can thetexts considered in this dissertation contribute to a language and literature curriculumthat critically engages with monolingualism in its historical and textual dimensions?3

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ContentsPrefacevAcknwledgementsxiiINTRODUCTION: THE NEW COSMOPOLITAN MONOLINGUALISM ........................................... 1PRELUDE IN THE SCHOOLYARD: BERLIN’S HERBERT HOOVER HIGH SCHOOL.............................................. 1SHARING SPACE: MONOLINGUALISM AND MULTILINGUALISM SUPERIMPOSED............................................ 3LEOPARDS IN THE TEMPLE: FIGURING MONOLINGUALISM AS SPATIAL CONSTRAINT .................................. 7TOWARD A MULTILINGUAL STYLISTICS OF SINGLE-LANGUAGE TEXTUALITY............................................12HISTORICIZING MONOLINGUALISM ................................................................................................................16MODERNITY’S IMPLIED MONOLINGUAL ........................................................................................................ 18MODERNISM VERSUS MONOLINGUALISM IN LITERATURE ............................................................................20SPACE-DEIXIS AND MULTILINGUAL NARRATIVE ..........................................................................................21MULTILINGUALISM OR HETEROGLOSSIA?...................................................................................................... 24MONOLINGUALISM IN LITERATURE AND LINGUISTICS..................................................................................26A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY.............................................................................................................................29ON POLYGLOT EXPERIMENTATION IN LITERATURE ......................................................................................32PRELUDE IN THE PARLIAMENT........................................................................................................................35THE NEW COSMOPOLITAN MONOLINGUALISM..............................................................................................40PART ONEIN THE OTHER ROOM: MULTILINGUAL HYPOTEXTS................................................................... 46CHAPTER ONEKAFKA: THE FOURTH UNITY ...................................................................................................................49KAFKA: MONO- OR MULTI .............................................................................................................................51AMID A DOUBLE MONOLINGUALISM .............................................................................................................57THE CHAUVINIST HAS LOST HIS WAY...........................................................................................................59LINGUA NON GRATA: THE SPECTER OF YIDDISH ..........................................................................................63A MONOLINGUALISM ARTIST.........................................................................................................................67THE MISSING PERSON (1911–1914)...............................................................................................................69VOLATILE COGNATES AND FORLORN PRONOUNS .........................................................................................77TAMPERING WITH LANGUAGE ........................................................................................................................83FIGURING THE OTHER LANGUAGE...................................................................................................................85ALWAYS THAT CRY OF THE JACKDAWS......................................................................................................... 90THE FOURTH UNITY ........................................................................................................................................ 92CHAPTER TWOLEVI: THERE OCCASIONALLY CAME A WORD................................................................................95SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF THE THIRD REICH ..........................................................................................98INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN HITLER’S NEW EUROPE.................................................................101SPRACHARBEIT ..............................................................................................................................................104A LINGUA GERMANA....................................................................................................................................107SPEAKING IN THE AFTERMATH .....................................................................................................................111ASSIMILATED RECOLLECTIONS, TRANSLINGUAL MANUSCRIPTS ...............................................................113WITNESSING THE UNPUBLISHABLE ..............................................................................................................115iii

PREFACEThe more we forbid ourselves to conceive ofhybrids, the more possible their interbreedingbecomes—such is the paradox of the moderns.—Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern 1What were the languages of twentieth-century Germany? After 1955, millions of laborrecruits traversed and settled in its two eastern and western Republics—making meaningsin Turkish, Korean, Italian, and Spanish. From 1945 to 1955, expellees from EasternEurope crossed linguistic paths with Soviet soldiers and French Displaced Personsthroughout the four occupied sectors. From 1933 to 1945, while millions of Yiddish,Polish, Spanish, and Hungarian speakers were forced into transports toward concentrationcamps, the Third Reich’s soldiers and language teachers were promulgating German as anew global language as far south as Sofia and Gibraltar, and exiles like Leo Spitzer andThomas Mann relocated their eloquence to !stanbul and Pacific Palisades. Before that,demographers counted Yiddish-speaking Jews as the vanguards of Germanness in theEast, and Franz Kafka practiced Hebrew to get ready for a voyage to Palestine. Longbefore declaring itself an immigration country in 2005, such juxtapositions of languagewere both inevitable in, and formative of, the states and territories called “Germany” inthe last hundred years.But Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble was voicing a majority viewpoint amongGerman lawmakers when he opened and shut the question of multilingual identity in thefollowing way: “What can we expect from foreigners who are living with us1 Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1993. 12.v

For decades, such lush and troubling illustrations have been interpreted as figures ofidentity-(re)construction, writerly anxiety, ethnic marginalization, or aporias withlanguage as such. 4 Multilinguality seemed to present a dead-end or implausible detour forliterary close-reading; after all, the text does not appear to contain or perform anythingelse but one language. Perhaps because of disciplinary constraints, the unproblematizedmonolingualism of literary production, or the specter of intentional fallacy, scholarshiphas not seen fit to allow such passages to resonate—indeed tremble—with the livedexperiences and practices of everyday multilinguality.But what kind of a Haus was Kafka hesitating to rebuild, and how did the prospect ofhaving more than one linguistic domicile become so frightful? What—among his Czech,Yiddish, Prague German, Hebrew, Italian, French, and English—was this “material”, this“smallest constitutive part” out of which he considered rebuilding himself in thosemoments when writing withheld itself from him? And out of what kind of disposition ordiscipline did he, after all, chronicle this dubious reconstruction in High German alone?Like many multilingual authors who find themselves in the hegemonic traction oflinguistic domination, Kafka deliberately chooses monolingualism as a kind of critical,aesthetic medium—as oil painters might restrict themselves to pencil or charcoal torender a particular kind of figure visible. Instead of understanding their choice to write inone language only (or one at a time) as a cultural politics of affiliation with a givenspeech community, audience, ethnic group, or political program, I suggest readingmonolingual writing by multilingual authors as a kind of critical, ascetic praxis—one thatso wie einer, dessen Haus unsicher ist, daneben ein sicheres aufbauen will, womöglich aus Material desalten. Schlimm ist es allerdings, wenn mitten im Bau seine Kraft aufhört und er statt eines zwarunsichern aber doch vollständigen Hauses, ein halb zerstörtes und ein halbfertiges hat, also nichts.”4Hans Reiss. “Kafka on the Writer’s Task.” The Modern Language Review 66.1 (1971): 113–124.vii

makes a unique and potent range of figural articulations possible. Fueled by the frictionbetween constraint and transgression, by the rigorous or playful observation of howmodernity segregates languages from one another into distinct social and functionalspaces, these writers rouse the kind of self-reflexive philosophical fictions that literarycode-switching would not be able to effect.My main wager is that the literary texts I analyze in these five chapters share theproject of rehistoricizing, even provincializing, the monolingual ideology of which theyare a reproduction. These authors manipulate the dominant, narrative language of the textinto spatial and deictic figures—creating oddly menacing thresholds, alluring otherrooms, troubling ruptures between “here” and “there,” buildings with two doors, andunreachable, distant surfaces upon which “other” language is sequestered. Often the textsthemselves stagger laterally at the level of the syntagm, sentence, or chapter, resulting in“many low structures standing tightly together”—which was one way Kafka describedthe recalcitrant narrative object of his last novel The Castle. 5 By refusing to overlook howa single-language “law” binds their own literary composition, these texts becomepreoccupied with signaling those dispersed, absent, or recalcitrant other sites of languagethat they cannot “present” for the reader.In doing so, they direct literary historical attention to a web of unpublished andunwritten hypotexts—oral narratives trafficked and cited in multiple languages, whetherTurkish, Yiddish, Czech, Italian, English, or creoles thereof in between—that havenourished the field of German Studies. Whether between Yiddish and German in Kafka,5 Franz Kafka. The Castle: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text. Trans. Mark Harman. NewYork: Schocken Books, 1998. 8.viii

etween concentration camp pidgin-creoles and national languages in Levi, or betweenthe German and Turkish of Özdamar and Pamuk, one senses the uncanny textures of atense boundary between a present, textual monolingualism and an absent, worldlymultilinguality.In grasping literary monolingualism not as a natural state of things, but as a kind of“discourse with a side-long glance at someone else’s hostile word,” 6 these authors’ textsturn upon themselves, straining against “the bias of the artifact” endemic to nationalliteratures. 7 They endeavor to perform—not describe—the multilingual world, a matrix ofthought and feeling from which their writing is nonetheless formally alienated.In selecting this set of philosophical fictions about monolingualism in the Germantwentieth century, I hope to highlight new lines of kinship between their disparatecontexts, while allowing the texts to wander from the ethno-national designations thatstill condition how they are interpreted. To cite the inspiring agnosticism that fuels Wai-Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents, a constellation of philologically unrelatedtexts mayecho one another from far off, force us to go back and periodize all over again. It isan unfinished business, messing up any paradigm that assumes its data to becomplete. We don't know where any particular genre might spiral out, whatoffshoots might spin off from it. We don't know how much time it will take, or howmuch space it will string together. 86 Medvedev, Pavel N., Valentin N. Volo"inov, Pam Morris", and Michail M. Bachtin. The Bakhtin Reader.London [u.a.]: Arnold, 1995. 108.7 Gary Saul Morson. “Sideshadowing and Tempics.” New Literary History. 29.4 (1998): 599–624. 595.8 Wai-Chee Dimock. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2006. 78.ix

Yet these works I consider are also united by the scholarly oddity that, among thevoluminous secondary literature dedicated to each of their literary worlds, multilingualconcerns have played only an ancillary and text-external role—whether in Kafka Studies,Holocaust Studies, or Turkish German Studies, where “language” has tended to be writlarge and in the singular. 9 Each of the forthcoming chapters opens with an endeavor topoint out the monolingual leanings of the respective corpora of secondary literature.Then, through stylistic and figural analysis, I attempt to “repatriate” these texts into themultilingual context of their production. In Pieter Judson’s words, such interventions aimto “eschew the aura of exceptionalism—and even exoticism—often attached to termssuch as ‘bilingualism’… and insist instead on the normalcy of the behaviors that [such]terms describe.” 10Beyond a difficult intimacy with the German language, Pamuk, Özdamar, Levi, andKafka share an impulse to perform, and to lay bare, the effects of monolingualism, torender it visible for critique. At the risk of terminological excess, their writing ishenolingual—as derived from Max Müller’s concept of henotheism as a “devotion to asingle God while accepting the existence of other gods.” 11 Imminent with signs born byanother language, they nonetheless refrain from introducing those signs explicitly. As theconstructivist painter Alexander Rodchenko put it, the medium of the monochrome “isthe reminder of the culture we have not been able to create.” 12 The authors and texts9 Important exceptions in each case are discussed in the chapters that follow.10 Pieter Judson. Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 6.11 Max Müller. “On Henotheism, Polytheism, Monotheism, and Atheism.” The Contemporary Review 33(1878): 707–734. 707.12 David Batchelor. “In Bed with the Monochrome.” From an Aesthetic Point of View. Ed. Peter Osborne.London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000. 153.x

considered in what follows offer a similarly stirring reminder—of the still latentpossibility of writing a world that deals, thinks, and feels outside of monolingualism.xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSNow that the time presses urgentlyAnd the tasks are finishedTo all of you the modest wishThat the autumn be long and mild.—Primo LeviI am so grateful for the support and forbearance of those who have already read parts ofthis dissertation, and for the interest of those who may do so in the future. I thank my(scores of) foreign language teachers throughout the years—all the way back to mybrother Bob and my aunt Genevieve, who helped me to enjoy the sounds and syllables ofSpanish for the first time. While writing this dissertation, I have been buoyed up by thepatient curiosity and friendship of my grandmother Louise, my sister-in-law Lindy, mynephew Fin and niece Cailin. Of course, my mom Kathy and my partner Russell have feltall the crests and troughs along with me, and I am blessed to be able to call them myclosest friends.For their warm encouragement, I am indebted to the professors and staff of theDepartment of German at UC Berkeley. Claire Kramsch has inspired me, at every step, tobecome a keener observer of language and language learning, and her mentorshipcontinues to be one of the great surprises of my life. Deniz Göktürk has introduced me toso many bold and subtle ways to think in a cross-disciplinary way about the dilemmas ofstudying national literatures in the twenty-first century, and I am honored to have her asmy colleague and committee chair. Anton Kaes has shared with me the joy of taking onfresh and daunting research projects and the thrill of collaboration along the way. Fromthe start, these three teachers and friends nourished my excitement about life-longscholarly exploration.xii

I have also been greatly enlivened by other teachers who I have met at importantmoments: Minoo Moallem, Nikolaus Euba, Ayla Algar, Roman Graf, Heike Fahrenberg,Susan Roney-O’Brien, Bill Hanks, Sarah Louise Richardson, Sarah Schulman, LizCrockett, Elena Taylor-Garcia, Jennifer Santos, Chantelle Warner, Alicia Bessette, JulieKoser, Mehtap Söyler, Justine Holmes, Graziano Paolicelli, Dorian Merina, ChristopherMoes, Corey Datz-Greenberg, Vassil Vassilev, Noah Miller, Yael Rivera, UrselBrückner, and all my friends and family on Clarke Street.For their generous and thoughtful feedback on this project I want to thank KristinDickinson, Robin Ellis, Emily Banwell, Kurt Beals, Christina Gerhardt, Jeroen Dewulf,Emina Musanovic, W. Dan Wilson, Donald Backman, Elaine Tennant, Mike Huffmaster,Priscilla Layne, Karen Feldman, David Divita, Niklaus Largier, the Berkeley LanguageCenter, and the participants of the graduate colloquium in Cultural Studies at theHumboldt University in Berlin. And of course I am grateful to the writers and artistsdiscussed in this dissertation, who have unearthed vivid illustrations of how mono- andmultilingualism collide with one another in the making of literature. It is in the spirit oftheir work—of partaking in particular discursive constraints while simultaneouslycritiquing them—that this dissertation refrains from switching back and forth betweenlanguages midstream. Original passages in German, Turkish, Italian, and French willappear in footnotes.I also continue to be enriched by the people I lost while this study was in preparation:Bob Skinner, Ryan Curtis, Eva Cormier, Viki Scott, Claire Gramling, and my father, PaulGramling.xiii—Oakland, August 2008

Introduction: The New Cosmopolitan MonolingualismPrelude in the Schoolyard: Berlin’s Herbert Hoover High SchoolNo institution without a space of legitimation.—René Lourau 1It was standing room only. The international press corps—from the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung to Al Jazeera—turned to face the front of the room, where theteenage spokespersons were taking their seats. An immigration activist in the crowdcalled out to Student Body President Asad Suleman, pressing him to describe what it feltlike to be a victim. Amicably poised, the 16-year-old answered back: “I don’t understandthe question. Could you please be more precise?” 2 The room broke out in laughter.Ninety percent of the students at this school grew up speaking multiple languages—switching midsentence and midexperience from Urdu, Polish, or Turkish into German,and back, as a matter of course. In early 2005, the school administration at HerbertHoover made a splashy debut in national immigration politics by implementing aGerman-only language policy on its campus. The policy’s jurisdiction extended beyondthe classroom—into lunchtime, recess, class-trips, and all interactions on school grounds.Over the next nine months, as monolingual policy and multilingual habitus collidedwith one another, the school became a high-profile mirror-space of the twenty-firstcentury German nation. 3 Advocates of cultural integration and scholastic achievement for“youth with migration backgrounds” quickly elevated Class President Suleman to an1 René Lourau. L’analyseur Lip. Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1974. 141.2 Jörg Lau. “Selbstachtung und Selbstverbesserung: Der Patriotismus der Berliner Republik.” Merkur:Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 9 Sept. 2006. “Ich verstehe die Frage nicht. Können Siebitte präzisieren?” Unless otherwise specified, English translations are my own.3 Ingrid Gogolin. Der monolinguale Habitus der multilingualen Schule. Münster: Waxmann, 1994.1

almost oracular status as a maverick defender of the German-only [Deutsch-Pflicht]policy. In a measured tone that nonplussed feuilletonists of all political persuasions, theteenager enumerated the practical benefits of the monolingualist policy: “Our Germanhas improved in the last year, and aggressions are subsiding now that everyone hasstarted to try to understand each other in one language.” 4But Suleman’s schoolyard realpolitik inflamed the Turkish daily newspaper Hürriyet[Freedom], whose editors dubbed the school “an institute for forced Germanization.” 5Seconding Hürriyet’s vivid condemnation was the prominent Berlin Green Partylegislator Özcan Mutlu, who rebuked the Hoover language compact as just one more in aseries of hegemonic impertinences sprouting up in a global city that, by now, shouldknow better. Mutlu took stock of the affair as follows:Given the recent ‘conscience test’ targeting Muslims—as well as the general desireto sharpen immigration regulations—it is no coincidence that there is now aprohibition against speaking one’s mother tongue at school in the province ofBerlin. 6Mutlu’s inductive gesture—of projecting the school’s strategic monolingualism uponBerlin as a whole and, by easy extension, the Federal Republic itself—indicates the4 Lau 2006a. “Unser Deutsch hat sich im letzten Jahr verbessert, und auch die Aggressionen gehen zurück,seitdem sich alle in einer Sprache zu verständigen versuchen.”5 Class President Suleman is of Pakistani descent, and some conjectured that his advocacy for German asthe school’s lingua franca arose out of experiences of social exclusion among the Turkish-speakingplurality of the school. Lau 2006a.6 Lau 2006a. “Es ist kein Zufall, dass es nach dem gegen Muslime gerichteten Gewissenstest und demWunsch, das Zuwanderungsrecht zu verschärfen, jetzt im Bundesland Berlin ein Verbot gibt, in derSchule die Muttersprache zu sprechen.”2

longstanding tradition of adverse multilingualism in German-speaking lands. 10 Formillions of multiple-language users far less renown than Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, KarlKraus, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Elias Canetti, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Orhan Pamuk,speaking (or not speaking) German is an act for which the concepts “choice” or“obligation” offer little insight. Unlike voluntary polyglots who have studied foreignlanguages in educational settings, acute clashes with language hegemony are—for thespeaker of Turkish in post-War Berlin or Yiddish in Imperial Prague—everyday featuresof social life.But at Herbert Hoover, it seemed that the students were among the least concernedabout the arrival of performative monolingualism to campus. 11 When FederalCommissioner for Integration Maria Böhmer stopped by to interview the affectedstudents about the pledge they had been asked to take, the young people passed over thepiquant topicality of the international press battle, calling her attention instead to otherinstitutional needs: reducing class sizes to 25 students, increasing the minimumapplication quota for foreign-born teachers, providing extra help and tutoring in German,guaranteeing post-secondary traineeships for graduating students, and facilitatingstudents’ advancement to college-preparatory courses at Gymnasium. 12 None of theseconcerns had played a decisive role in the press debate, because they did not squarely10 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1986.11 Here, I have chosen the term “performative monolingualism” to highlight the formalistic politicalspectacle of this language pledge, for which students and their parents were asked to sign “oaths.”Aleksei Yurchak. Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2005. 19–21.12 Ali Varlı. “Dil yasa#ı i$lemiyor.” Hürriyet [!stanbul] 22 Jan. 2007.4

condone or contest the idea that multilingual students should only speak German when atschool.Many concluded that the Hoover monolingual contract amounted to little more thanwindow-dressing. A group of Turkish-speaking students assured the Hürriyet newspaper:“There has been this decision to prohibit other languages at school. But it is not enforced.In the schoolyard and in other places we still speak Turkish among ourselves. In fact, weoften even speak Turkish in class. The prohibition doesn’t work.” 13 Consider also thedauntless voluntarism with which Herbert Hoover Class Vice-President Halime Nurindismissed the charges of linguistic hegemony leveled against her school: “We weren’tforced. We wanted to speak German anyway. And there is no punishment if we switchover into our mother tongues once in a while.” 14 Here, Nurin champions the spirit of theGerman-only pledge, on the basis that it does nothing more than coincide with her ownpreferred linguistic routines. In the same breath, however, she asserts her and her friends’ultimate autonomy from the policy.Pledged to unitary language on paper but committed to violating it, Nurin stands in along line of code-switchers who traffic openly in the midst of monolingual power. In thisvein, it might make sense to think of monolingualism not as multilingualism’s opposingprinciple—as the absence of plural, copresent codes—but as the institutional power tomisrecognize certain codes in its midst. Such may be the productive paradox ofmonolingual ideology: that it arises in full knowledge that it will be breached over and13 Varlı 2007. “Okulda böyle bir yasak kararı var. Fakat bu uygulanmıyor. Okulun bahçesinde ve di#eryerlerde biz kendi aramızda yine de Türkçe konu$uyoruz. Hatta bazen sınıfta bile Türkçekonu$tu#umuz oluyor. Yasak i$lemiyor.” The students interviewed were Ay$egül Albayrak, CansuBa$aran and Tu#ba Duman.14 Lau 2006a. “ Wir wurden nicht gezwungen. Wir wollen selber gerne Deutsch sprechen. Es gibt auchkeine Strafen, wenn wir doch einmal in unsere Muttersprachen überwechseln.”5

over again. With Sisyphean zeal, monolingualism is a structure that restricts the terms ofofficial exchange in a given space to recognizable meanings based “solely on the basis ofinterlocutors’ mutual knowledge of established practices of interpretation.” 15In a pathbreaking study, the intercultural pedagogy researcher Ingrid Gogolin hascalled this condition “the monolingual habitus of the multilingual school,” highlightinghow this superimposition of single-language and plural-language modes of being isinscribed spatially. In the conclusion of this introductory chapter, I will extend Gogolin’sconception to understand a re-emerging political ideology about language use in publicinstitutions amidst globalization and European integration—a phenomenon I will callcosmopolitan monolingualism.But while these pedagogical and political dilemmas have served as the primaryimpetus for this dissertation, its chief concern lies with literature, with the possibility ofbringing the effects and historicity of monolingualism to light through literary prose. Inthe chapters that follow, I develop one account of the literary fictions that have arisen toindex such circumstances—of multiple-language intrusions in single-languagejurisdictions. In an age of 90% multilingual high schools and multidirectional massmigration across the globe, one of the most steadfast and puzzling among monolingualinstitutions is that of literary prose itself. The fact that multilingualism is regarded asiconoclastic, if not eccentric, in literary fiction in an era when it has become omnipresentin social life is the riddle to which this dissertation is devoted.15 Sally McConnell-Giner. “The Sexual (Re)Production of Meaning: A Discourse-Based Theory.”Manuscript, 387–88. Quoted in Charis Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler. A Feminist Dictionary.Boston: Pandora Press, 1985. 264.6

Leopards in the Temple: Figuring Monolingualism as Spatial ConstraintTo cross the linguistic border implies that youdecenter your voice. The border crosser developstwo or more voices.—Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, “Bilingualism, Biculturalism,and Borders” 16Monolingualism is a spatial strategy; since the 17 th century its mode of operation has beento claim and conserve territory—not through the wholesale exclusion of “other”languages, but through strategies of selective recognition. 17 Amid accelerating conquestand contact beyond the European continent and the waning mandate of Latin, statemonolingualisms arose out of an acute encounter with the centrifugal tendencies oflanguage. 18 Far from being the purveyors of a naïve ethnic supremacy, the eighteenthcentury’s strategic monolingualists like J. G. Herder knew full well the precariousexcesses and ecological plentitudes of a multilingual world. 19Whether in Revolutionary France, 20 the United States under President TheodoreRoosevelt, 21 the Turkish Republic of the 1930s, 22 the Third Reich’s New Europe, 23 or in16 Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco. “Bilingualism, Biculturalism, and Borders.” English is BrokenHere: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. Ed. Coco Fusco. New York: The New Press, 1995.17 A thoughtful discussion of linguistic recognition in multilingual contexts can be found in Alamin M.Mazrui. The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998. 110.18 Georg Kremnitz. Mehrsprachigkeit in der Literatur: Wie Autoren ihre Sprachen wählen. Vienna:Praesenz, 2004.19 Johann Gottfried Herder. Frühe Schriften, 1764–1772. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest Information andLearning, 2001.20 Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel. Une politique de la langue: la Révolutionfrançaise et les patois. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.21 Werner Sollors. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of AmericanLiterature. New York: New York University Press, 1998.22 Zafer Çelik. Language Engineering and the Formation of a Nation: Turkey between 1932–1938. Ankara:Middle Eastern Technical University Press, 2003.23 Eckard Michels. “Deutsch als Weltsprache? Franz Thierfelder, the Deutsche Akademie in Munich andthe Promotion of the German Language Abroad, 1923–1945.” German History 22.2 (2004): 206–228.7

today’s robust rollcall of “immigration countries,” monolingualism has sought to securean aura of universal receptivity and complicity from its multiple-language publics, even ifthis means sacrificing the dominant language to routine invasion and impurity, as Kafkaimagined in a parable:Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificialpitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance,and it becomes a part of the ceremony. 24In Kafka’s spatial story, the ritual in the temple occurs symbiotically with that which, as amatter of course, enters unauthorized and desecrates it. The creatures that break into theceremonial space in the off-hours leave traces of having been there, of what they havetaken with them. Their participation is regular and expected—and yet unratified andradically foreign.Despite their remote origins, the works of Kafka, Levi, Özdamar, and Pamukcontribute to a narrative stylistics in which the “other language” is made hauntinglypresent through an evoked distance from the “here” of narration—either through spatial,deictic, or syntactic displacements. The other language is the apophatic, the “elsewhere.”For Kafka, it is the “other room,” distracting the narrative from completion.This lateral tendency lends these texts—Kafka’s The Missing Person (1914) and TheCastle (1924), Levi’s If this is a Man (1946) and The Periodic Table (1975), andÖzdamar’s Life is a Caravanserai Has Two Doors I Came in One I Went out The Other(1992)—their famously odd narrative form. In lieu of a temporal, longitudinal arc from24 Franz Kafka. Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe: Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II. Frankfurt am Main:Fischer, 1992. 117. “Leoparden brechen in den Tempel ein und saufen die Opferkrüge leer; daswiederholt sich immer wieder; schließlich kann man es vorausberechnen, und es wird ein Teil derZeremonie.”8

signals of simultaneity, dispersal, and resistance to dialectical integration(Nebeneinandersein). 28Gary Saul Morson proposed that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky developed ways to resistthe compulsory, forward progression of their own works—to overcome “Lessing’scurse”—through narrative techniques he calls sideshadowing.” 29 While Morson seeks todiscover the lateral, spatial fissures of open-endedness in a text, my analysis will focus onhow this simultaneity and possibility manifest in spatial figures that indicate amultilingual world beyond the pale of the single language on the page, “gazing back” atthe reader. Straining against their monolingual contract with the implied (monolingual)reader, these texts point to other spaces—beyond the pledge-territory of Deutsch-Pflicht—where multiple, living codes mix and countenance one another without metaformalconstraint. The thresholds to which these texts point—like the kitchen door inKafka’s parable “Returning Home”—are ominous, tempting lines that create a split in thespace of the narrative: The cramped “here” of the manifest text has, at its margins, the“elsewhere” of its multilingual hypotext. 30It is perhaps for this reason that these texts—Kafka’s The Missing Person and TheCastle, Levi’s The Truce, Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Life is a Caravanserai, and Pamuk’sSnow—were either left unfinished or were declared unfinishable by their ownprotagonists. The precondition for “finishing” the book apparently lay beyond the text, ina language, or mix of languages, to which the text cannot grant admission. In lieu of a28 Wilhelm Traugott Krug. System der theoretischen Philosophie, Teil II. Königsberg: August WilhelmUnzer, 1830. 53.29 Morson 1998, 595.30 Gérard Genette. Palimpsests: Reading the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and ClaudeDoubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.10

forward progression, their narratives move laterally, making only incidental headwaytowards completing the representational task that they began—whether entering theCastle or joining the Oklahoma Theater in Kafka, witnessing Birkenau for Levi, or tellinga political story about contemporary Turkish German entanglements for Özdamar andPamuk. As a structural principle, this lateral stylistics indexes a refusal to foreclose onrepresentation in any one language. Marek Nekula, one of the few and foremostproponents of a multilingual reading of Kafka’s works, describes this stylistic principle oflateral simultaneity as follows:He understands his writing as a construction of the Tower of Babel. He didn’t, ofcourse, conceive his texts as integrally constructed novels, which we know from the19th century. His texts are horizontally scattered fragments, as is typical for moderntexts (Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge). We also find such fragmentsin the Tower of Babel’s sprawling foundation, which is formed by the partially builtGreat Wall as mentioned in Kafka’s text The Great Wall of China. Nor does thecastle in Kafka’s text The Castle appear in the unified form of a castle (with atower); rather it is scattered throughout buildings in the village. 31For Meir Sternberg, this stylistic recourse to language-sideshadowing can even take on anasyndetonic form at the level of the syntagm, in texts that highlight thelexical or referential deficiency of the target rather than the source language, as whenthe half-Russian heroine of [Rebecca West’s 1966 novel] The Birds Fall Downmentions the many loving names conferred on oil by the Orthodox Church: “theholy oil, the oil of gladness, the oil of sanctification, a royal robe, a seal of safety, thedelight of the heart, an eternal joy, the oil of salvation.” 3231 Marek Nekula. “The Divided City: Prague’s Public Space and Franz Kafka’s Readings of Prague.” Eds.M. Nekula, I. Fleischmann, A. Greule. Franz Kafka im sprachnationalen Kontext seiner Zeit. Spracheund nationale Identität in öffentlichen Institutionen der böhmischen Länder. Weimar, Köln: Böhlau,2007, 85-106. 97.32 Meir Sternberg. “Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis.” Poetics Today. 2.4 (1981):221–239. 12.11

Indeed, Stanley Corngold’s keen exploration of rhetorical excess in Kafka’s In the PenalColony—a writerly tendency that he calls allotria (other people’s things) and excreta(waste)—seems ripe for such a multilingual rethinking as well. 33Toward a Multilingual Stylistics of Single-Language TextualityAlready in 1981, Meir Sternberg described monolingualism’s uncomfortable kinship withliterature in the following terms:[The] framing and juxtaposition of differently-encoded speech are […] particularlycommon within the fictive worlds created in literature, with their variegatedreferential contexts, frequent shifts from milieu to milieu, abundance of dialoguescenes, and keen interest in the language of reality and the reality of language.Literary art thus finds itself confronted by a formidable mimetic challenge: how torepresent the reality of polylingual discourse through a communicative mediumwhich is normally unilingual. 34Yet as the monk-narrator Clemens intimated in Thomas Mann’s 1951 novel The HolySinner, it may be contrary to a literary text’s very disposition to recognize its ownlinguistic particularity. Literature’s semi-autonomous agnosticism about nationallanguages, Clemens assures us, better befits the “spirit of narration”:It is quite uncertain in what language I write, whether Latin, French, German orAnglo-Saxon, and indeed it is all the same; for say I write Thiudisch, such as theGermans speak who live in Helvetia, then tomorrow British stands on the paper andit is a Breton book I have written. By no means do I assert that I possess all thetongues; but they run all together in my writing and become one-in other words,language. For the thing is so, that the spirit of narration is free to the point ofabstraction, whose medium is language in and for itself, language itself, which setsitself as absolute and does not greatly care about idioms and national linguistic gods.33 Corngold 2001.34 Sternberg 1981, 222.12

That indeed would be polytheistic and pagan. God is spirit, and above languages islanguage. 35Though it is nearly impossible not to cheer on the hubris of this man of the cloth as hedresses down the gods of linguistic nationalism, it is precisely his stance towardliterariness that still leaves contemporary literary theory at a loss for concepts whenmultilingualism is at hand. Put in a baldly paradoxical way, under what conditions andwith what effects is the text’s own national language to be considered a text-internalconcern?To attempt an answer, I propose the following non-literary scene: Consider a group ofteenagers code-switching a bit too loudly between German and Turkish on a local bus inUpper Franconia—an intimate yet public space where a healthy measure of intralingual,dialectal heteroglossia is already at play among speakers of Berlinish, Oberfränkish,Swiss German, Bavarian, and High German. What conceptual vocabulary is available fordescribing what the German Turkish code-switchers effect in this symbolic setting? Forwhom does their speech (regardless of its content or bearing) represent an initiation, athreshold, or a repudiation? Just a first-order “bus” before—universal, holistic, andtranslatable—it now becomes a double-space, an Autobus-otobüs, cathected by thepolitical histories that this language contact signals. In such settings, multilinguals render35 Thomas Mann. The Holy Sinner. Trans. Helen T. Lowe-Porter. Berkeley: University of California Press,1992. 10. Cited in Sternberg 1981, 3. “Es ist ganz ungewiss, in welcher Sprache ich schreibe, oblateinisch, franzäsisch, deutsch oder angelsächsisch, und es ist auch das gleiche, denn schreibe ich etwaauf thiudisch, wie die Helvetien bewohnenden Alamannen reden, so steht morgen Britisch auf demPapier, und es ist ein britunsches Buch, das ich geschrieben habe. Keineswegs behaupte ich, dass ichdie Sprachen alle beherrsche, aber sie rinnen mir ineinander in meinem Schreiben und werden eins,nämlich Sprache. Denn so verhält es sich, dass der Geist der Erzählung ein bis zur Abstraktheitungebundener Geist ist, dessen Mittel die Sprache an sich und als solche, die Sprache selbst ist, welchesich als absolut setzt und nicht viel nach Idiomen und sprachlichen Landesgöttern fragt. Das ware jaauch polytheistisch und heidnisch. Gott ist Geist, und über den Sprachen ist die Sprache.”13

audible a prism of “condensed historicities” 36 —of the means by which languages havebeen nationalized, standardized, territorialized, and excluded over time. Mann’s monkClemens would be surprised, from his 12 th century point of view, to observe howintricately language juxtapositions matter in a world often called “post-national.” 37Of course, we have already touched on the fact that literature—perhaps by its verydisposition—cannot relate to everyday multilingualism in a mimetic way. The textsconsidered in this dissertation converge on the relationship between the multilingualismof the world and the language of literature will be one of complex and circuitousemulation—a mode that is more cubist than impressionist, and certainly moreimpressionist than realist. Nonetheless, these authors develop figural models of what it is“like” to be interpellated in a language one does not understand, or does not understandwell. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of such moments asdisinterpellations—in which a given speaker or sign, by the nature of the semiotic code ituses, excludes or refuses to hail another present listener. Intruding on the conventions andceremonies of the single-language social contract, foreign speech tends to exclude,threaten, please, bypass, silence, enfranchise, confound, embarrass, initiate, and/orexhilarate the various addressees or bystanders in its midst, redistributing social roles andconduits of exchange. Suspending the fiction of “linguistic communism” 38 —of anabstract and universally accessible langue—multilingual situations can conjure out of thesimplest daily events a prism of multiple, simultaneous, and often irreconcilable sub-36 Judith Butler. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. 3.37 Jürgen Habermas. Die postnationale Konstellation: politische Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1998.38 Pierre Bourdieu. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. 43.14

events, private exchanges, backchannels, and barriers. This phenomenological domainnourishes the literary prose to which this dissertation turns.The texts of Kafka, Pamuk, Özdamar, and Levi register how any given utterance maybe a simultaneous act of initiation and dis-initation along the multilingual fulcrum. Eachspeech act can reorganize participation in a way that is autonomatic and irrevocable—sometimes comical, sometimes terrifying. Hollywood vividly brought this spectrum ofmultilingual effects to the screen with the feature films Babel (Dir. Alejandro GonzálezIñárritu) and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation ofKazakhstan (Dir. Larry Charles) in 2006. Released almost simultaneously, these twofilms could not have offered a more polarized view on the pleasures and adversities ofmultilingual positionality; where Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen impersonated a strident andvoluble appropriator of “other people’s languages” with dexterous disregard forintercultural competence, Babel’s cast of characters encountered only the bleak apoplexyof being unable to make oneself understood in an urgent situation. In that multilingualspeech tends to affect differently invested participants against their will, it is no surprisethat Quintilian described the use of foreign words in his Manual of Rhetoric [Deinstitutione oratoria] as barbarolexis—the barbaric word. 39Yet where language contact and language mixing had, for millennia, been an occasionfor tribal, ethnic, and local strife, modern statecraft upgraded this strife—to cite Kafka’sillustration above—to the status of ceremony. Such may be the volatile political promiseof multilinguality, as territorialized languages struggle to maintain their hold in an era of39 K. Alfons Knauth. “Literary Multilingualism I: General Outlines and Western World.” Encyclopedia ofLife Support Systems (EOLSS). Oxford: UNESCO Eolss Publishers, 2007.15

global traffic in meaning. 40 Since the uneven implantation of a “one-language, onenation”principle over the course of Western Europe’s nineteenth century, the presence ofan “other language” in monolingual space has acquired the jarring capacity to upset therules of legitimate social participation. 41Historicizing MonolingualismThat forms of Renaissance genre play andmacaronic verse persist through the early modernperiod dramatizes the sense of the joy, the livelypride in translative skill, and the sheer abundanceof expressive modes available to the uprightperson in a still multilingual world… How did theWest move so quickly, it now seems, from thedominant model of expressive abundance to themodern model of the national language as soletrue source of being and expression?—Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson, The Bilingual Text 42Like secularism, monolingualism is a young invention—in the guise of a state of nature.Elite medieval and early modern reading publics had been reasonably expected tonavigate among a common set of erudite textual languages. In a pre-modern Europewhere orthography and grammatology were scholastic practices only and not yetstrategies of nationalization, it was not possible to talk of native speakers incontradistinction to non-native speakers. 43 The post-Enlightenment norm of writing inone supra-local language to the exclusion of others was an outgrowth of mass literacy40 Mary Louise Pratt. ”The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration.” Profession 2002.2(2002): 25–36.41 Even in Europe’s traditionally multilingual states like Switzerland and Spain, a principle of territorialaccommodation for each discrete language is maintained. Helder De Schutter. “The LinguisticTerritoriality Principle—A Critique.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 25.2 (2008): 105–120.42 Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Press, 2007. 137.43 By “grammatology” I mean the science of analyzing writing, theorized in Ignace Gelb. A Study ofWriting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.16

initiatives, as standard national vernaculars eclipsed Latin. Prior to the 18 th century’sepisteme of monolingual mastery, continental textual culture (both oral and written) hadgenerally been made and trafficked among jacks-of-all-languages—whether monks,scholars, royals, or scribes.It is thus a great deal more than theoreticist revisionism to claim that monolingualismwas one of the pivotal inventions of the late 18 th century. As in Foucault’s account of therise of sexuality as an episteme, a late 18 th century incitement to scientific discourse about“languages” arose between 1710 and 1810, in the wake of widely circulated travelogues,ethnographies, trade narratives, pilgrimage testimonies, and accelerated culturalcommerce with New Worlds to the East, South, and West. 44 This discourse about theallolingual, the linguistic Other, provided groundwork for fostering standard vernacularsat home. 45According to this rough historical pattern, statutory monolingualism became afounding feature of state-space in Western Europe. 46 Through language, the state-spacewas increasingly made to act, in Gadamer’s terms, as a “virtuality” of hereness 47 —asemblance of spatial isomorphism across what had heretofore been a non-unifiableterritory. The monolingualized state territory “appear[ed] homogenous, the samethroughout, organized according to a rationality of the identical and the repetitive that44 Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.45 Herder 2001.46 The exceptional case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire will be discussed in Chapter One.47 Hans-Georg Gadamer. “Phänomenologie, Hermeneutik, Metaphysik.” Gesammelte Werke 10. Tübingen:Mohr, 1995. 105.17

allows the state to introduce its presence, control, and surveillance in the most isolatedcorners.” 48Modernity’s Implied MonolingualIn making the claim that monolingualism is a post-Enlightenment order of discourse, caremust be taken to not misconceive medieval Europe as a panlingual utopia, unfettered bydurable and violent language hierarchies. Though it is true that the standardization ofdomestic languages (amid the pluralization of linguistic foreignness in the domesticgeographic imagination) was an unprecedented shift in the 18 th century, large-scaleviolence and persecution based on language use is documented over the course of the 14 thand 15 th centuries throughout West, South, and Central Europe. It is also certain thatmonolinguality—understood as single-language use (in contradistinction tomonolingualism as the effect of exclusive single-language ideology)—indeed roughlycharacterized the livelihoods of a plurality of Europe’s non-nomadic peasantry. Yet forany of Europe’s readers and writers—for whom traffic with the non-local was anecessary routine—monolinguality was hardly possible.Amid the ascendancy of standard national vernaculars it became possible—and thenorthodox—for literary texts to assume a monolingual compact with an implied readerwithin the national vernacular. To invoke Anthony Giddens, the implied reader was deskilledfrom a polyliterate into a monoliterate, as national literacy campaigns found greatsuccess among new actual readers. 49 The impact of this text-internal transformation of the48 Henri Lefebvre. La pensée marxiste et la ville. Tournai: Casterman, 1978. 259–324.49 Anthony Giddens. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.Wolfgang Iser. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan toBeckett. Trans. David Henry Wilson. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.18

implied reader comes into clearer focus when we consider how Rabelais’ fifteenthcenturyheroes had once addressed their demoiselles in 13 languages. As Bakhtin notes,“The Renaissance is the only period in the history of European literature that marked theend of a dual language [vernacular and ecclesiastical system] and a linguistictransformation. Much of what was possible at that exceptional time later becameimpossible.” 50Before the mid-19 th century, critics from Molière to Genthe had relegated “languagemixing” to the realm of comedic affectation. On the post-Renaissance national stage,multiple-language-use became the ideal literary vehicle for indexing folly. Tragedy, inparticular, would avoid Quintilian’s device of barbarolexia, the mixing of languages, atall costs. Meanwhile, multilinguality-as-comedy found theoretical explanation inF. W. Genthe’s 1836 The Mixing of Languages and the Ridiculousness of the Same,which collapsed the Quintilianic barbarolexis with the renaissance genres of comicfolly. 51 By the time Goethe was in pursuit of a “world literature” in 1830, the question ofmixed and mixing languages was all but swept off the philological table. Supernationalliterary exchange by way of “world literature” would proceed through a cosmopolitancommerce in ideas and figures, mediated by translation from one nationalmonolingualism to another, often by way of the hypercentral language of internationaldiplomacy, French. 5250 Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1994. 465.51 Knauth 2007. Hokenson 2007, 17–78. J. W. Genthe. “Vermischung der Sprachen und das Lächerlichederselben.” Geschichte der macaronischen Poesie. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970. 7.52 Abram de Swaan. Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001.19

Modernism versus Monolingualism in LiteratureNotwithstanding the panlingual experimentalism of Joyce, Schnitzler, and Pound, 53twentieth-century European literature remains an awkward bottleneck for the historicalcohabitation between single-language text and multiple-language world-space. Sincemost national philologies were conditioned upon a monolingual “language pledge” overthe course of the 19 th century, their canonical texts have been hard pressed to indexlinguistic “contact zones.” 54 Even (and sometimes especially) the literary texts ofmultilingual migrants become unwilling conscripts in single-language dominance. 55 Butas migration and cyber-traffic continue to render languages mobile and plural in a broadrepertoire of transnational permutations, literature’s contract with monolingualism cannotbut fray at its edges.This is, therefore, a dissertation for a literary audience, for whom monolingualismplays a delicate historical and epistemological role. Using an overarching framework ofspatial relations, I claim that multilingualism is not the mere plurality of languages withinone realm, situation, or institution, but rather that modern multilingualism is in an acuteand manifest struggle with monolingualism at the site of the individual speaker, astruggle that expresses itself literarily in critical de-centerings of the self, figurations ofdistance, absence, and ominous, tempting thresholds. This focus on the strife betweenmono- and multilingualism in literary writing does not seek to distract from neighboring53 James Joyce. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1939. Arthur Schnitzler. Fräulein Else. Berlin:Zsolnay, 1924. Ezra Pound. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1970. Onmodernist literary panlingualism, see also Knauth 2007.54 Mary Louise Pratt. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 1991.91 (1991): 33-40.55 Tom Cheesman. Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions. Rochester: CamdenHouse, 2007.20

interpretations, such as Doris Sommer’s ludic readings of Chicana/o lyricism in BilingualAesthetics or Steven Kellman’s praise for polyglot writers in The TranslingualImagination. 56 My readings in the following chapters seek to interweave with thoseapproaches, while calling attention to the discursive power of monolingualism.Space-Deixis and Multilingual NarrativeWe will remember how Halime Nurin, the class vice-president at the Herbert Hooverschool, narrated her own experience of the German-only language compact: “We weren’tforced. We wanted to speak German anyway. And there is no punishment if we switchover into our mother languages once in a while.” 57 With the word überwechseln [switchover] she cites from the metaphorical lexicon that makes translingual practices thinkable,that lends them their social scaffolding. Non-literary accounts of this kind partake in therudiments of a multilingual literary stylistics.But how can the effects of this mixing and mutual estrangement, of being(dis)interpellated in a language one does not understand, be indexed or reenacted in asingle-language literary text? 58 Perhaps more difficult still is the possibility ofrepresenting partial and uneven proficiencies: one person’s capacity to understand but notto speak another’s language, or vice versa. Is the literariness of literary language capableof implanting these global dilemmas into the “ceremonial” space of monolingual text?56 Steven G. Kellman. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. DorisSommer. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.57 Lau 2006a. “Wir wurden nicht gezwungen. Wir wollen selber gerne Deutsch sprechen. Es gibt auchkeine Strafen, wenn wir doch einmal in unsere Muttersprachen überwechseln.”58 Louis Althusser. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: MonthlyReview Press, 1971.21

Klaus Mann’s account of the act of self-translation in Today and Tomorrow (1969) offersa vivid counterpoint to Nurin’s bootstrapping sovereignty:I was often at the point of hating my “alter ego,” my Americanized “I” withmy entire soul. Why did that guy use so many expressions and constructionsfor which there was simply no corresponding usage in “my” language—inGerman, that is? Even the simplest English words made me rack my brain. Iknew what my doppelgänger over there in New York had wanted to expresswhen he wrote down words like “challenge,” “relaxation,” or “frustrated.”But it was precisely this all-too-exact knowledge that made it difficult for meto decide on a more or less corresponding German word. For “a challenge”is not quite the same as a “Herausforderung,” the German “Entspannung”doesn’t quite correspond to the Anglo-Saxon “relaxation.” And more than afew torturous quarter-hours can be spent ruminating about whether “adisappointed Person” is an “enttäuschte” or an “unbefriedigte” person. Is ajob an “Aufgabe,” a “Pflicht”, a “Stellung”? Whatever the case, translating“job” was certainly also “a challenge,” and one could certainly not speak of“relaxation.” 59Where Nurin holds firm with a unified speaking “I” in her (oral) account, Mann stylizeshis narrative spatially and with a split first-person. There is a proximal I and a distalI. The origo of narrative is partitioned between the translator and the translated, between59 Klaus Mann, Heute und Morgen. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1969. 291. “Oft war ichnahe daran, mein “alter ego”, mein amerikanisiertes Ich aus ganzer Seele zu hassen. Warum benutzteder Bursche so viele Ausdrücke und Konstruktionen, für die es in “meiner” Sprache—im Deutschennämlich—die entsprechende Wendung nun einmal nicht gibt? Selbst die einfachsten englischenVokabeln verursachten mir Kopfzerbrechen. Freilich, ich wusste wohl, was mein Doppelgänger dortdrüben in New York hatte ausdrücken wollen, wenn er Worte wie “a challenge,” ” relaxation,”“frustrated” niederschrieb; aber gerade dieses allzu genaue Wissen machte es mir schwer, mich für einmehr oder minder korrespondierendes deutsches Wort zu entscheiden. “A challenge” ist ebenkeineswegs ganz dasselbe wie eine “Herausforderung”, die deutsche “Entspannung” entspricht nichtunbedingt der angelsächsischen “relaxation”, und nun mag manch quälende Viertelstunde lang darübrnachsinnen, ob “a frustrated person” eine”enttäuschte “ Person ist oder eine “unbefriedigte”. Ist ein“job” eine “Aufgabe”, eine “Pflicht”, eine “Stellung”? Nun, der Uebersetzung “job,” mit dem ich es zutun hatte, war jedenfalls auch “a challenge.”22

the now and then, between the here and there. 60 “That guy,” Mann’s wayward, otherlanguageddoppelgänger in New York, competes for the reins of the utterance; his distalposition “there” flouts the syntactic progression of the text “here” at the moment of its(re)constitution. The other language performs a menacing admonishment to hiscounterpart’s “fluent” progression from word to sentence to paragraph.Hannah Arendt offers another spatial account of writing cross-lingually:I write in English, but I have never lost the distance. There is a monstrousdifference between a mother language and another language. In my case, Ican express it in terribly simple terms. In German, I know a pretty significantportion of German poems by heart. They are always in motion in the back ofmy mind. That is certainly something that I could never achieve again. InGerman, I allow myself things that I would never allow myself in English. 61Arendt describes a relationship of synchronicity and distance—what she calls an“enormous difference” [ungeheurer Unterschied]—between her multiple codes, whichpre-conditions the use of either one of them. (Though speaking in German, she uses theEnglish phrase “in the back of my mind” to designate where she envisions the Germanpoetry of her youth residing.) Despite highly advanced proficiency in the two languages,her bond to a corpus of poetry in German through the mnemonics of adolescence—a60 Karl Bühler. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: Fischer, 1965.61 Verena Jung. ”Writing Germany in Exile: The Bilingual Author as Cultural Mediator: Klaus Mann,Stefan Heym, Rudolf Arnheim and Hannah Arendt.” Journal of Multilingual and MulticulturalDevelopment 25.5–6 (2004): 529–46. My emphasis. “Ich schreibe in Englisch, aber ich habe dieDistanz nie verloren. Es ist ein ungeheurer Unterschied zwischen Muttersprache und einer anderenSprache. Bei mir kann ich das furchtbar einfach sagen: Im Deutschen kenne ich einen ziemlich großenTeil deutscher Gedichte auswendig. Die bewegen sich da immer irgendwie im Hinterkopf / in the backof my mind /; das ist natürlich nie wieder zu erreichen. Im Deutschen erlaube ich mir Dinge, die ich mirim Englischen nicht erlauben würde.”23

practical feat unrepeatable in English—sustains this “distance” between the self and itsresident other within her own linguistic subjectivity.Like Mann, Arendt’s remarks indicate the altercations that can arise when operatingmultilingually, and when giving a multilingual account of oneself. The social conventionof univocality is suspended, and the variously decentered figures of one’s agency inlanguage split off into re-imagined, affective locations.Multilingualism or Heteroglossia?Though French translators of M. M. Bakhtin often render%&'()%*+,* [raznorechie,heteroglossia] as plurilinguisme, 62 the difference between Bakhtin’s “many-speechedness”and multilingualism is more than a matter of degree. Though his writings inspiredgenerations of literary scholars to analyze the multiple-voiced discourse of the novel—itswild tangle of enunciations and citations from the language of others, its animatedstruggles against unitary speech—Bakhtin did not come to specific terms with “languagebarriers” and cross-lingual noncomprehension. Though multilingualism and heteroglossiaare necessarily confluent in social life, the concept of heteroglossia does not offer anaccount of the uneven and drastic effects of cross-lingual interaction and address.In Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin proposed that “It is quite possible toimagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one thatcannot in principle be fitted into the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so tospeak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among62 Jacques Bres, Patrick Pierre Haillet, Sylvie Mellet, Henning Nolke, Laurence Rosier. Dialogisme etPolyphonie: Approches Linguistiques. Brussels: De Boeck-Duculot, 2005.24

various consciousnesses.” 63 Thus the potential for a syncretic point of contact and mutualcomprehension among the various consciousnesses underlies even the most richlyheteroglossic novel. Even if they are unable to reproduce the words of others and maymiss important meanings, participants in a heteroglossic situation can continue to upholdconversational conventions as if such a “point of contact” between consciousnesses wereultimately achievable. It is thus fitting that where heteroglossia had been for Bakhtin thedefining innovation of the novel, the novel was the defining literary innovation of themodern national community for Benedict Anderson. 64 In the end, the kinetic diversity of(national) voice was always recuperable and imaginable as a syncretic whole.In contrast to the heteroglossic, multilingual situations have no equivalent unitary“point of contact” to center them; they are settings in which properly linguisticcomprehension among various participants may be radically diminished. The “eventpotential,” of which Bakhtin writes, is split among several overlapping subgroups ofspeakers who may not be able to brook the divides between them, even when good faithpresides. Affective and political at once, the social contours of multilingual situationsopen new possibilities for literary representation—of embodiment, space, folly, fright,and pleasure. The allolingual—the speaker/utterance of an other language—holds thispotential to denaturalize a monolingual setting, to perform and highlight a semioticpartitioning and doubling before one’s very eyes.63 Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1984. 81.64 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.London: Verso, 1991.25

I therefore refer to monolingualism as a “meta-formal” constraint, in order tohighlight 1) language choice as a text-internal feature subject to critique, and 2)adherence to single-language use as a discursive convention or aesthetic choice ratherthan a mere natural eventuality or a politics of cultural assimilation. Given the vastspectrum of figural estrangement, innovation, and rhetorical excess that we regard as theproper domain of literary writing, it may give us (productive and critical) pause—amidour epoch’s interest in transnationalism and cultural hybridity—to note the inveterateorthodoxy of single-language narrative in the literary field. As a meta-formal constraint,this orthodoxy constitutively excludes what I understand as a “multilingual hypotext”—the manifest co-presence of multiple, interacting, situated, and yet disparate codes oflanguage, which routinely fails the muster of publishability. It is this threshold betweenmonolingual text and multilingual hypotext that these works seek to discover.Monolingualism in Literature and LinguisticsIn the domain of applied linguistics, research interest into phenomena of multiplelanguageuse in education and society have fueled forums of exchange like TheInternational Journal of Bilingualism and the series Multilingual Matters. The work ofAneta Pavlenko and Claire Kramsch in Second Language Acquisition 65 ; John Gumperzand Ben Rampton in sociolinguistics 66 ; Ingrid Gogolin and Adelheid Hu in intercultural65 Claire Kramsch. “The Multilingual Experience: Insights from Language Memoirs.” Transit 1.1 (2005).“The Multilingual Subject.” Plurilingualität und Identität. Eds. Inez de Florio-Hansen and AdelheidHu. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2003. 107–124. Aneta Pavlenko. Emotions and Multilingualism.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.66 Ben Rampton. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents. London: Longman, 1995. JohnGumperz, “The Speech Community.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York:Macmillan, 1968. 381–386.26

education 67 ; Kees de Bot in psycholinguistics 68 ; and Alastair Pennycook, SureshCanagarajah, Probal Dasgupta, Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan in English as a SecondLanguage 69 have laid abundant conceptual groundwork for future exchange between thehumanities and social sciences in the domain of multilingualism.Given the strong historical and institutional links between multilingualism researchand educational policy, it is not surprising that there has been less sustained attention tomultilingualism in the humanities, and in literary studies in particular, where the biases ofnational philology remain at the helm. Enduring contributors to a still nascent discourseon literary multilingualism have been Gloria Anzaldúa in feminist and Chicana studies 70 ;Steven G. Kellman and Doris Sommer in Comparative Literature 71 ; Werner Sollors inU.S. American literature 72 ; Mary Louise Pratt in literary linguistics 73 ; Leslie A. Adelsonand Tom Cheesman in Turkish German literature 74 ; Deniz Göktürk and Chris Wahl infilm studies 75 ; Georg Kremnitz in German literary historiography 76 ; and Emily Apter in67 Gogolin 1994. Inez De Florio-Hansen and Adelheid Hu. Plurilingualität und Identität: Zur Selbst- undFremdwahrnehmung mehrsprachiger Menschen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2003.68 Kees de Bot. “The Multilingual Lexicon: Modeling Selection and Control.” International Journal ofMultilingualism 1.1 (2004):17-32.69 Alestair Pennycook. “English as a Language always in Translation.” European Journal of EnglishStudies 12.2 (2008): 33-47. Suresh Canagarajah. Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Probal Dasgupta. “Trafficking in Words: Languages,Missionaries and Translators.” Translation: Reflections, Refractions, Transformations. Eds. Paul St-Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005. 42–56. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan.“Notes on Translatability in an Uneven World.” Translation Today 2.2 (2005): 12–24.70 Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera. San Francisco: Spinsters, 1987.71 Kellman 2000. Sommer 2004.72 Werner Sollors. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of AmericanLiterature. New York: New York University Press, 1998.73 Pratt 2002. Pratt and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. Linguistics for Students of Literature. New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.74 Leslie A. Adelson. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New CriticalGrammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Cheesman 2007.75 Deniz Göktürk. “Turkish Delight–German Fright: Migrant Identities in Transnational Cinema.” MediatedIdentities. Eds. Deniz Derman, Karen Ross and Nevena Dakovic. !stanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2001.27

translation studies. 77 The work of these researchers signals that inquiry into theirrevocable multilingualism of “world literature” is slowly gaining traction in literaryscholarship—even if that traction gives rise to such clairvoyant modesty as this, fromFranco Moretti:What does it mean, studying world literature? How do we do it? I work on WestEuropean narrative between 1790 and 1930, and already feel like a charlatan outsideof Britain or France. World literature? Many people have read more and better thanI have, of course, but still, we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatureshere. 78Each of these disciplinary corpora—the literary and the linguistic—appears to take forgranted something that the other cannot. By definition, literary scholarship is engagedwith textual artifacts that are always already restrained in their multilinguality bycontemporary editorial and format criteria, even when the polysemy of the text is at itsmost acute. On the other hand, linguistic methods that rely on empirical data-collection,transcriptions, and oral interviews often transpose their research protocols onto literarylanguage. In some cases, this leads social science researchers to extract from a literarytext prima facie data about an experience or phenomenon, without coming to terms withthe deliberate stylistic, lyrical, and genre-based literariness that were essential to itscomposition. Still, the vast majority of analytical discovery and innovation about131–149. Chris Wahl. Das Sprechen des Spielfilms: über die Auswirkungen von hörbaren Dialogen aufProduktion und Rezeption, Ästhetik und Internationalität der siebten Kunst. Trier: WissenschaftlicherVerlag Trier, 2005.76 Kremnitz 2004.77 Emily Apter. “On Translation in a Global Market.” Public Culture 13.1 (2001): 1–12.78 Franco Moretti. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1.1 (2000): 54-68. 55. PascalCasanova. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1999.28

multilingualism has taken place within an applied linguistics framework that honors thesocial primacy of “language contact.”I hope to draw these two analytical trajectories closer together: 1) an awareness of theliterariness of text (its genres, styles, narrative innovations, and antimimetic language)and 2) a sustained critique of language-choice dilemmas and language-contactphenomena, as they contribute to the making of literary texts. This procedure will relyless on “strategically essentializing“ multilingual authorship, than on recusing theunstated norm of monolingual authorship.A Note on TerminologySince inquiry into multilingualism is taking place in so many scholarly fields and cannotbe properly at home in any one, no standard vocabulary has emerged to cover theconceptual waterfront. Though researchers from fields ranging from comparativeliterature to computer-aided translation offer sound arguments for the use of“polylingual” over “multilingual,” or “glottopolitics” over “language planning,” 79 weseem to recognize from our various vantage points that the phenomena themselvesrequire a patient and asymptotic language of critical description. To borrow a distinctionfrom plant taxonomy, my approach to multiple-language use will be that of a “lumper”rather than a “splitter,” compromising the incipient technical distinctions in an effort tohighlight a broad problematic for literary research.In her monograph on emotions and multilingualism, Aneta Pavlenko aises aterminological question that is worth repeating here:79 Respectively, Sternberg 1981, and L. Guespin and J-B. Marcellesi. “Pour la glottopolitique.” Langages83 (1986): 5–34.29

the natural “raw material” that is transformed into a “domesticated product” of gender. 82Were the terminology more forgiving, one could speak of a “language/monolanguagesystem” in which monolingualism is the result of a technologization of language in all itsecological contingencies. As a systematized and strategically generated “field of culturalreproduction” in the age of modern nation-building, state monolingualism produces andconserves a universe of belief that is structurally geared to exclude other such universes.The basic subject of a monolingualism is the individual native speaker. 83On Polyglot Experimentation in LiteratureOne might rightfully suggest that the place to look for a literary stylistics of multiplelanguageuse would be in experimental prose-ventures like Arthur Schnitzler’s FräuleinElse, Christine Brook-Rose’s In Between, or Ingeborg Bachmann’s Simultan, wherecode-switching is an omnipresent literary device. Such texts, dynamic domains forconceptualizing a multilingual stylistics of literature, push beyond the occasional use of aforeign word or phrase for effect.Many literary researchers interested in code-switching do prefer to work with textsthat devote rich poetic resources to text-internal multilinguality. Manfred Schmeling, forinstance, holds that “Multilinguality does not refer to authors who speak multiplelanguages and yet still shape their concrete texts monolingually.” 84 His rigorous criteria82 Rubin’s sex/gender system has since undergone decades of revision and critique, but may nonethelessserve here as a valuable heuristic. Gayle Rubin. “The Traffic in Women.” Feminist Anthropology: AReader. Ed. Ellen Levin. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.83 Claire Kramsch. “The Privilege of the Non-Native Speaker.” PMLA 112.3 (1997): 359-369.84 Manfred Schmeling. “Multilingualität und Interkulturalität im Gegenwartsroman.” Literatur undVielsprachigkeit. Ed. Monika Schmitz-Emans. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2004, 221–235.“Mehrsprachigkeit soll sich hier nicht auf Autoren beziehen, die zwar mehrere Sprachen sprechen, aberden konkreten Text monolingual gestalten.”32

notwithstanding, Schmeling’s approach overlooks the meta-formal constraints ofmonolingualism, which tends to restrict the differentiation of languages within a giventext to a certain concentric sphere of unitary language. I think of this exclusive preferencefor manifest code-switching within the literary text—as the ultimate index formultilinguality—the presentist approach. In order for the text to be appropriate foranalysis, the text must make its linguistic Other manifest among the signs on the page.A second mode of multilingual critique—one that focuses on submergedmultilingualism—pursues traces of one language behind or beneath another. In his studyof “Yinglish” literature in the US, Murray Baumgarten suggests that “If these works arewritten in English, it is a language with Yiddish lurking behind every Anglo-Saxoncharacter […] Yiddish, as language and culture, works to make its presence felt in thecharacter, situation, and narrative voice of the story, as it does in the vocabulary, syntax,and morphology of the Western language in which it is written.” 85 Hana Wirth-Nesherexpands on this characterization, asserting “not only the literal presence of twolanguages, but also the echoes of another language and culture detected in the prose ofthe one language of which the text is composed. “ 86 Yoram Ben-David made a similaroverture in describing Kafka’s work as a primer in “how to write Hebrew in Germanwords.” 8785 Murray Baumgarten. City Scriptures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. 10.86 Hana Wirth-Nesher. “Between Mother Tongue and Native Language in Call it Sleep.” Prooftexts: AJournal of Jewish Literary History 10 (1990): 297-312. 298.87 David B. Suchoff. “Kafka's Languages: Hebrew and Yiddish in The Trial and Amerika.” Ed. DorisSommer. Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations. New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2003, 251-274. 271.33

Such are a few of the interpretive modes through which multilinguality is beingbrought to the fore in literary studies today. The momentum arising from such analyses—of code-switching and other manifestly multi-code features—offers a testing ground forthe epistemology of translingual practice. The downside to these approaches is that theyhave a very small collection of exceptional text experiments at their disposal—experiments which reached a public readership either because their author had alreadybeen prolific in monolingual publishing (Bachmann, Schnitzler), or because the prospectof a multilingual text aroused enough conceptual receptivity to overcome structuralmarketing barriers (Brook-Rose).From Dada to the Spatialists and Anthropophagists, a range of twentieth centurypanlingual activists sought to foreground Babelic juxtapositions as a means to critiquesocial inequities and national chauvinisms. Yet these polyglot experiments lie at theoutskirts, both of literary publishing and of public awareness. To select such polyglottexts for a literary genealogy of multilingualism would result in a minoritizingengagement with multilinguality-as-experiment. Furthermore, and paradoxically, textscomposed in multiple languages at once often lack the potency to figurally reenact for thereader the kind of multilingual social spaces and phenomena discussed above.34

Prelude in the ParliamentMy mate here can’t speak German anymore, nowthat he has a German passport.—July 2007, kebap stand, Schlesisches Tor, Berlin 88Becoming German has never been so acutely a matter of language as it is in the firstdecade of the twenty-first century. Watershed citizenship reforms at the end of the 1990sseemed to indicate Germany’s peripatetic departure from an ethno-national “right ofblood” [ius sanguinis] toward a French-inspired “right of territory” [ius soli]. 89 Yet in theseven years of the policy’s implementation, a paradigm quite different from territorialcitizenship appears to be taking hold: a ius linguarum, or “right of languages.”The public use of multiple languages among Germany’s immigrants and postimmigrantshas been a cause for parliamentary brow-furling since the 1970s, but nationalimmigration politics did not undergo a coherent “linguistic turn” until century’s end. 90The sixteen-year Kohl government (1983–1999), with its program of stimulating labormigrants’ “readiness-to-return” [Rückkehrbereitschaft] to their countries of ancestry, hadfunded heritage language-learning programs on the basis that “Everyone has a right tolive in his own homeland.” 91 When legislative power shifted to the center-left in 1999, aseries of multi-party commissions convened to decide what it would mean for Germany88 Personal conversation. “Der Kollege kann kein Deutsch mehr, da er jetzt den deutschen Paß hat.”89 Göktürk et al. 2007, 1–20.90 See for example Bambi Schieffelin and Rachelle C. Doucet. “’The Real’ Hatian Creole: Ideology,Metalinguistics and Orthographic Choice.” Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Eds. B.Schieffelin, K. Woodard, and P. Kroskrity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 285–316.91 Göktürk et al. 2007, 46. My emphasis. Here the focus was on second and third generation children ofguestworkers, who were not eligible for German citizenship at birth.35

to “come out” internationally as an immigration country. 92 Five years later, the multipartisanIndependent Commission on Migration delivered their findings:The tendency to seek naturalization is not great among migrants who cameto Germany before the 1973 recruitment ban. Apparently the requirementsfor naturalization were unattainable to them. In recognition of the farreachingintegration efforts of these people, the commission feels a moregenerous position on multiple citizenship is appropriate for this group ofpeople. These immigrants, as well as German society, have neglected the acquisition of theGerman language, because they were expected to have a limited period of residency. Duringnaturalization procedures, the blame for this situation should not be ascribed to these lawabidingimmigrants who have worked hard since their arrival in Germany and who haveraised their children here. 93Despite the Commission’s push for magnanimity in the realm of German languageproficiency, a broad legislative alliance arose to reconceptualize German as a pan-ethniclingua franca, a syncretic “guiding language” whose ameliorative power might render theclassic multicultural metrics—of parallel societies and cultural relativities—obsolete. 94 Inconfluence with this shift from “guiding culture” [Leitkultur] to what might be called a“guiding language” [Leitsprache], the country’s first-ever Immigration Law[Zuwanderungsgesetz] in 2005 stipulated German language competency as aprobationary condition of legal residence in Germany:Integration efforts on the part of foreigners will be supported by an offeringof integration courses. Integration courses include instruction in thelanguage, the legal order, the culture, and the history of Germany.92 Göktürk et al. 2007. 1–20.93 Göktürk et al. 2007, 184. My emphasis.94 During the 1998–2001 “guiding culture” debate [Leitkulturdebatte], the proposal that “German culture”should be foremost in a multicultural society set off alarm on the political Center-Left. Göktürk et al.2007, 313–329.36

Consequently, foreigners should become accustomed to the living conditionsin federal territory to the extent that they will possess the necessary selfsufficiencyto handle all aspects of everyday life without assistance from athird party. 95Quite suddenly, social assistance and visa renewals were made directly dependent on animmigrant’s enrollment in German language courses. Meanwhile, political defendants ofthe immigrant integration curriculum were refashioning German-language proficiencyfrom a coercive requirement into a civil right. The 235-million-Euro language packagefor non-EU nationals was framed as a social welfare provision, meant to redress aheretofore unjust and ethnicized system of immigrant enfranchisement, according towhich heritage-German resettlers from the Soviet Union had been granted no-costintegration courses, while Turks and Arabs had none. Through this rhetoric of redress,speaking German “without the assistance of a third party” was resignified as a socialjusticeimperative. Relieved of its dubious countenance as a state directive, it was recastas a hard-won and costly legislative coup. Fifty years after foreign nationals had beeninvited to work in West and East Germany, their descendants were now being invited intothe capital-rich German language. Considering how, for decades, migrant labormobilization in West Germany had relied, if passively, on the compromised linguisticpositions of non-German workers in German workplaces, the advent of a federal iuslinguarum in the 2000’s indeed indicated a civic–political sea-change. The old rumblingsof ethnic nationhood—juridically untenable in this New Europe—were being translatedinto an orthotics of language.95 Göktürk et al. 2007, 191.37

When asked to clarify how the various generations of immigrants already living inGermany, as well as their family members abroad, might best ready themselves for thefederal government’s language initiatives, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäubleresponded:I’m just beginning to think about that. But we’re seeing that it doesn’t makesense for children to go into elementary school without knowledge ofGerman. So they have to learn German before that. Concretely, I have askedmyself: so are you suggesting that we hold language courses in Anatolia?Indeed, there are such audio-visual possibilities and one can do the test bytelephone. We’re trying that out here at the Interior Ministry as we speak. 96In this upbeat, impromptu gloss—redolent of more than a few bureaucratic salvos fromKafka’s The Castle—Interior Minister Schäuble mixed a procedural experimentalismwith conceptual intransigence vis-à-vis the linguistic turn that his ministry was chargedwith overseeing. Though the means toward full civic proficiency in German may requireunprecedented innovation, the goal remained as steady as it was non-specific.German consulates around the world were instructed to advise visa petitioners thatspouses and children of legal residents could not join their next-of-kin in Germanywithout achieving the following level of language competence:Basic knowledge of the German language is in evidence only when the Germanlanguage and its major features are commanded in written and spoken form to theextent that familiar, quotidian expressions and very simple sentences geared to the96 Peter Carstens and Markus Wehner. “Schäuble: ‘Der Islam ist keine Bedrohung für uns’Bundesinnenminister Wolfgang Schäuble im Interview.” Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung 12Mar. 2006. “Ich bin noch am Anfang, darüber nachzudenken. Aber wir sehen, dass es keinen Sinn hat,dass die Kinder ohne Deutschkenntnisse in die Grundschule kommen. Also müssen sie vorher Deutschlernen. Und in dem konkreten Fall habe ich gleich gefragt: Wie wollt ihr denn Sprachkurse in Anatolienmachen? Aber da gibt es audiovisuelle Möglichkeiten, den Test kann man sogar telefonisch machen.Wir prüfen das jetzt hier im Innenministerium.38

satisfaction of concrete needs, are understood and used. The prospective personmust also be in a position to introduce himself/herself and others. For example,they must be able to answer questions about where they live, which people theyknow, what things they possess. They must be able to make themselves understoodin a simple way when interlocutors speak to them slowly and clearly and are ready toassist them. Furthermore, they must be in the position to seek information in thecontext of daily life or to communicate such a message to another person (forexample, on forms, personal letters, or short notes). 97While thousands of consular officials beyond Germany’s borders were suiting up forthese new and complex language-assessment responsibilities for which they weregenerally undertrained, the political imperative at home remained uncannily simple: learnGerman if you want to stay here. Interior Minister Schäuble formulated his expectationsin a March 2006 interview:What can we expect from foreigners who are living with us permanently? We canexpect that they want to live here with us. They should learn German and take part inthe diversity of civic-societal life. They should not want to live as if they weren’t here. 98Speaking German thus became the singular pathway away from of cultural unilateralismand “not being here” toward civic diversity and “being here.” Such jurisgenerativesentiments indicate how German has acquired a panacean political valence in the current97 Bundesverwaltungsamt. “Wichtige Information für Spätaussiedlerbewerber.” Berlin: n.p., 2005.“‘Grundkenntnisse’ der deutschen Sprache liegen nur dann vor, wenn die deutsche Sprache in ihrenGrundzügen in Wort und Schrift so beherrscht wird, dass vertraute, alltägliche Ausdrücke und ganzeinfache Sätze, die auf die Befriedigung konkreter Bedürfnisse zielen, verstanden und verwendetwerden. Die einzubeziehende Person muss auch in der Lage sein, sich und andere vorzustellen sowieanderen Leuten Fragen zu ihrer Person zu stellen, beispielsweise wo sie wohnen, welche Leute siekennen oder welche Dinge sie besitzen, und muss Fragen dieser Art beantworten können. Sie muss sichauf einfache Art verständigen können, wenn die Gesprächspartner langsam und deutlich sprechen undbereit sind zu helfen. Sie muss ferner in der Lage sein, in kurzen Mitteilungen Informationen aus demalltäglichen Leben zu erfragen oder weiterzugeben (beispielsweise in Formularen, kurzen persönlichenBriefen oder einfachen Notizen).”98 Carstens et al. 2006. My emphasis. “Was können wir von Ausländern erwarten, die dauerhaft hier leben?Wir können erwarten, dass sie mit uns hier leben wollen. Sie sollten Deutsch lernen und amzivilgesellschaftlichen Leben in seiner Vielfalt teilnehmen. Sie sollten nicht so leben wollen, als wärensie nicht hier.”39

decade. Yet beneath the modest clarity of this proposal—learn German—lies a gauntletof epistemological ambiguities about additive versus exclusive culture, about statemonolingualism and linguistic capital, about how German-language proficiency (as acultural politics) must be performed—about where (and how) this “here” begins.The New Cosmopolitan MonolingualismThe more blurred and relative borders betweencultures are, the stronger the longing becomes fora clear structure of affiliation, for some houserules that name and allocate the spaces in one’sown house. No one wants to be thought of as abad host, nor to be known as inhospitable, butone does want to know who is going in and out ofhis house.—Zafer !enocak, Tongue Removal 99The Hoover school’s German-only policy resonated profoundly in public discourse,galvanizing a perception that migrants’ and post-migrants’ proficiency in German is abellwether of “the will to integrate” [Integrationswille]. The crowning indication of thisbroad national investiture in language proficiency came six months after Asad Suleman’spress conference, when the embattled Herbert Hoover school community was honoredwith the annual 75,000 Euro Prize of the German National Foundation [DeutscheNationalstiftung]. On its Website, the prize selection committee commended the Hooverproject for engenderinga common school life that excludes no student […] Parents and teachers agreed onthe German language after intensive dialogue and without governmental99 Zafer -enocak. Zungenentfernung. Bericht aus der Quarantänestation. Munich: Babel, 2001. 47. “Jeverwischter und relativer die Grenzen zwischen den Kulturen sind, umso starker wird die Sehnsuchtnach einer klaren Beziehungsstruktur, nach einer Hausordnung, die die Räume im eigenen Haus genaubenennt und zuweist. Niemand will als schlechter Gastgeber gelten, oder gar in den Ruf kommen,ungastlich zu sein, aber man möchte schon wissen, wer bei einem ein und ausgeht.”40

intervention. This self-driven initiative underscores the important of language as aprecondition for a type of integration that need not disturb the cultural roots of theparticipants. This emergence reaches far beyond Berlin’s borders as an example ofhow one group came to acknowledge its own best interests within the framework ofan active civic society. 100Officiating the prize-conferral ceremony, Bundestag President Norbert Lammert praisedthe school’s students and faculty—along with Germany’s 2006 National Soccer Team—as standard-bearers of successful integration. 101 He assured the audience thatYou will find no one who expresses an opposition to dialogue. And you will findabsolutely no one against tolerance. The question under which circumstances thesecome into being is however seldom posed and even less frequently answered [...]Every society [needs] a minimum inventory of common convictions andorientations. No political system can maintain its inner legitimacy without a culturalfundament of commonly held convictions. 102For Lammert, the Hoover school’s commitment to multicultural monolingualismexemplified a kind of integration avant-garde, leading the republic back toward its “innerlegitimacy.” 103 German was the “given language” through which this could take place. 104100 Deutsche Nationalstiftung. “Nationalpreis 2006.“ Accessed 14 Aug. 2008.http://www.nationalstiftung.de/nationalpreis2006.php. “Zur Verbesserung eines gemeinsamen, niemandausschließenden Schullebens…haben sich Schüler, Eltern und Lehrer nach intensiver Diskussion undohne behördliches Zutun auf die Schulsprache Deutsch geeinigt. Diese Eigeninitiative der Schuleunterstreicht die Bedeutung der Sprache als Integrationsvoraussetzung, ohne die kulturellen Wurzelnder beteiligten Menschen anzutasten. Das Vorgehen ist weit über Berlins Grenzen hinaus zu einemBeispiel eigener Interessenwahrnehmung im Rahmen einer aktiven Zivilgesellschaft geworden.”101 Deutsche Nationalstiftung. “Laudatio des Bundestagspräsidenten Dr. Norbert Lammert anlässlich derPreisverleihung des Nationalpreises an die Herbert-Hoover-Realschule in Berlin am 27. Juni 2006.”Accessed 14 Aug. 2008. http://www.nationalstiftung.de/nationalpreis2006.php.102 Lammert 2008. “Sie werden keinen finden, der sich gegen Dialoge ausspricht, und schon gar niemanden,der gegen Toleranz wäre. Die Frage, unter welchen Voraussetzungen beides zustande kommt, wirdschon sehr viel seltener gestellt und noch seltener beantwortet. [...] Jede Gesellschaft [braucht] einenMindestbestand an gemeinsamen Überzeugungen und Orientierungen... Kein politisches System kannohne ein kulturelles Fundament gemeinsam getragener Überzeugungen seine innere Legitimationaufrechterhalten.”103 This sentiment is not unlike that of some leading voices in the linguistic justice debate, for example WillKymlicka, who claims that democratic politics is a “politics in the vernacular,” requiring that ‘the only41

Speaking German-only in the schoolyard was the threshold to a minimum inventory ofnational values and core commitments, including civic diversity, gender equity, andreligious tolerance. But in his 2500 word congratulatory speech, Lammert (the nation’schief legislative officer) mentioned language—proficiency, plurality, use—no more thanthree times. Joining the cacophony of diagnoses about the Hoover School, heforegrounded “shared convictions and orientations” as the ultimate signified behindlanguage choice. Strategic monolingualism was to do the symbolic labor of civicunification that a multicultural politics of recognition had thus far been unable to broker.In his speech, Lammert echoed Habermas’ reluctant defense of unitary language asthe key to a pragmatics of cosmo-nationalism:If the manifold forms of communication are not to spread out centrifugally and belost in global villages, but rather foster a focused process of shaping will andopinion, a public sphere must be created. Participants must be able simultaneouslyto exchange contributions on the same subjects of the same relevance. It wasthrough this kind of communication—at that time conducted by literary means—that the nation-state knitted together a new network of solidarity, which enabled itto some extent to head off modernism’s drive to abstraction and to re-embed apopulation torn out of traditional life-relationships in the contexts of expanded andrationalized life-worlds. 105form in which genuine democracy occurs is within national boundaries.” Will Kymlicka. Politics in theVernacular. Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.325.104 Pheng Cheah. “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism.” Boundary 224.2 (1997): 157–197.105 Jürgen Habermas. A Berlin Republic. Trans. Steven Rendall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1997. 177.42

The philosophical tradition Lammert calls on in order to account for Deutsch-Pflicht wasnot Habermas’ communicative reason, 106 but rather Hans-Georg Gadamer’s maxim that“Only through language does the world dawn.” This world-dawning (German) languagewas, for Lammert, no longer a cultural bequest [Kulturbesitz] worth promoting throughphilological channels, but rather a de facto “common language“ of the multiethnicstudent body, singularly capable among the other languages of de-escalating conflict andaggression. This philosophical refraction of statutory monolingualism mirrored the 2005Immigration Law, in which proficiency in the German language is conceived as a sinequa non of civic subjectivity. Speaking German meant that one is finally poised to crossover from subcultural “parallel societies” [Parallelgesellschaften] into both “the world”and “the national community.” Said Schäuble in defense of this new cosmopolitanmonolingualism, “Everything depends on language: education, work, participation.”Lammert’s honorific to Gadamer merits further attention, because the axiom of aworld-dawning language was taken out of its context: one of Gadamer’s extendedcommentaries on Heidegger. As a whole, the passage prizes in language not civic unity,pragmatism, efficiency and mutual transparency, but rather Language’s sublime andendless differentiation. Here, Gadamer thinks through Heideggerian being-in-language ina way that would turn Lammert’s communitarian functionalism on its head:In 1920, Heidegger had dared to say from his pulpit as a young professor: “Itworlds.” [Es weltet.] With this, he meant that “being here” [Dasein] dawns (like thesun in the morning). In his mature years, the thinker could perhaps have said “Itwords.” [Es wortet.] For the world dawns first with language, it dawns for us, in theunlimited differentiability and differentiation of its self-disclosure. The virtuality of106 Jürgen Habermas. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1997.43

the word is the “here” of “being here.” Linguality [Sprachlichkeit] is the element inwhich we live, and thus it is less of an artifact or object—of whatever natural orscientific kind—than the manifestation of the “here” of our “being here.” 107In framing the German-only debate with the decontextualized axiom “The world dawnsfirst with language,” Lammert passes over what Gadamer intends to point out: the worldgives us language in complex forms that defy instrumentalization. Indeed Lammert’scitation of Gadamer’s axiom seems to countervail this claim, in that he imagines Germanas a national language with the power to initiate immigrants into “the world” ofentitlements, jobs, scholastic achievement, governance, and civic responsibility. Only(and this is the crux of Lammert’s cosmopolitan monolingualism) when a persondemonstrably comes out of the shadows of his heritage language, can she exemplify thecultural diversity for which German society is said to stand.Despite twenty years of popular discourse on cultural difference, globalization, andmigration, monolingualism as a threshold of civic initiation is a political technology onthe rebound. As research initiatives and advocacy organizations pursue language rights inthe context of multicultural monolingualism, the UNESCO Universal Declaration ofLanguage Rights maintains thatLanguage communities are currently threatened by a lack of self-government, alimited population or one that is partially or wholly dispersed, a fragile economy, an107 Gadamer 1995, 105. My emphasis. “1920 hatte er als junger Dozent vom Katheder aus zu sagen gewagt:“Es weltet.” Er meinte damit: “Sein” geht auf (wie die Sonne am Morgen). Als der Denker seiner Reifehätte er ähnlich sagen können: “Es wortet.” Denn erst mit der Sprache geht Welt auf, geht uns die Weltauf, in der unbegrenzten Differenziertheit und Differenzierung ihres Sichzeigens. Die Virtualtät desWortes ist zugleich das “Da” des Seins. Sprachlichkeit ist das Element, in dem wir leben, und daher istSprache nicht so sehr Gegenstand—von welcher natürlichen oder wissenschaftlichen Bewandtnisimmer—als vielmehr der Vollzug unseres Da, des “Da” das wir sind.”44

uncodified language, or a cultural model opposed to the dominant one, which makeit impossible for many languages to survive and develop. 108The chapters that follow are an attempt to highlight and describe a multilingual stylistics,a genre of figurative language that seeks to bring language contact and mixed-languageexperience to critical light for German Studies. Marked by a kinship of sensibility morethan a tradition of influence, the texts analyzed here conjure odd creatures and hermeticother-rooms: signals of a human universe that will always—barbarically—speak morethan one language at a time.108 Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, (Barcelona, 9 June 1996) http://www.linguisticdeclaration.org/decl-gb.htm.45

Part OneIn the Other Room: Multilingual HypotextsLiterature—to express it in reproachful terms—issuch a drastic curtailment of language. […] Thenoise-trumpets of nothingness.—Franz Kafka, diary, August 1917 1The first-person narrator of Kafka’s twenty-sentence parable “Returning Home”[Heimkehr] paces up and down his father’s courtyard. Old, unusable appliances and apuddle in the middle of the path block his way to the stairwell. Smelling the coffeecoming from behind the kitchen door, the narrator poses to himself the question: “Do youfeel at home?”The voice that answers, his own, begins to falter. “It is my fathers house, but eachpiece stands cold beside the next, as if it were otherwise occupied with its own concerns,some of which I have forgotten, some which I never knew. What can I do with them,what am I to them, even if I am my father’s son?” After this faltering deliberation, thenarrator demurs from knocking on the kitchen door, listening only from afar. “What ishappening in the kitchen is the secret of those sitting there […] The longer one standsbefore the door, the more foreign one becomes.” The eventuality that the narrator fearsthe most is that someone might come through the door, without his having knocked, andask him something.This dissertation is about what is being said by the muffled voices in the kitchen—where the coffee is brewing and the hearth is lit. Neither the text nor its narrator ever1 Franz Kafka. Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe: Tagebücher. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990. 818. “Literatur,als Vorwurf ausgesprochen, ist eine so starke Sprachverkürzung. […] Die Lärmtrompeten des Nichts.”46

enters or represents this other room directly; the “here” of the narrative remains outside,becoming increasingly foreign, among the multitude of entropic, juxtaposed items it hasforgotten how to use.To develop a conception of how space and language interact figurally in Kafka andLevi, the following two chapters account for the various “elsewheres” that haunt anddeter their narratives. I will use the term “multilingual hypotext” to designate what ishappening [was geschieht] in that other space. 2By hypotext, Gérard Genette sought to describe an implicit, pre-existing text uponwhich a new version or a new configuration is written, usually one that broadenscontemporary access to the source text, while obscuring a great deal of its linguistic andreferential specificity. As examples, Genette cites the hypotextual relations underlyingVirgil’s Latin adaptations of Homer, or Mateo Alemán Guzmán’s contemporaryrendering of the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes. 3 While replacing and refiguring aremote, predecessor text, these new texts nonetheless find ways of signaling their relationto that which they overwrite. Hypertexts include parodies, travesties, even AndyWarhol’s Mona Lisa's, called “Thirty is Better than One,” where the masterpiece isreproduced over and over in miniature next to itself.Hypotextuality is a useful concept for understanding multilinguality’s relationship toliterature. While a digraphic medium like film (with subtitles and visual cues) canrepresent milieus where multiple languages are used simultaneously, literary texts arehard-pressed to give voice to such spaces. I therefore adopt Genette’s concept to account2 Genette 1997, 523 Genette 1997, 7.47

for the fractious relation between monolingual literary texts and multilingual lifeworlds—a relation in which a single-language text signals and refers, often urgently, to apatently cross-lingual set of signifieds, oral histories, or collective experiences. Thoughthe term hypotext suggests one text “below” another, Kafka’s “Returning Home” rumblesa lively und unrepresentable language event happening “in the other room.” Next door tothe manifest text is the space of Other, unpublishable language—of the unruly admixtureof dialectal usages, Yiddish, Czech, and Prague German that, like the silent appliances inthe yard, Kafka could not “make use of” in his literary fiction. I have chosen to call thisrelationship hypotextual, rather than para- or intertextual, in order to highlight how theother room’s language remains “below” the threshold of publishability, given the metaformalconstraint of monolingual text to which its author subscribes.This relationship is a highly consequent feature in all of the narratives discussed inthe following chapters—from Kafka’s The Missing Person, to Levi’s The Truce,Özdamar’s Life is a Caravanserai, and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. Part One is an explorationof this hypotextual relation between multilingual language events and theirunrepresentability in monolingual text, and about the spatial relations through which thisunrepresentability is passionately figured in the writings of Franz Kafka and Primo Levi.Part Two explores Turkish German writing as the heir to Levi and Kafka’s precariouspositions with regard to German. Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Orhan Pamuk each engagein a similar mode of spatial figuration to indicate the haunting presence of a submerged,other-language hypotext.48

Chapter OneKafka: The Fourth UnityDo you know other languages beyond yourmother language? Which ones? How far does yourknowledge reach? Can you merely understandthese languages or also speak them, or can youalso make use of them through writtentranslations and compositions?—Personnel questionnaire, Assicurazioni Generali, 1907 4So prompted, the 24-year-old law school graduate Franz Kafka wrote back to hisprospective employer in longhand: “Bohemian, and beyond that French and English, butI’m out of practice in the latter two languages.” 5Less than a year later, Dr. Frantisek Kafka responded to a similar prompt withprovident stoicism: “The applicant has mastery over the German and Bohemian languagein oral and written form, and further commands the French, and partially the Englishlanguage.” 6 Leaving out the first-person “I” of the preceding response, Kafka now castshimself in the guise of a petitioner, or Petent, who commands multiple languages as aregent might administer his revier. This emboldened applicant no longer betrays anyhesitation about the extent of his multilingual talents. Though he claims mastery overGerman and Bohemian, Kafka characterizes his relationship to French and English4 Josef .ermak. “Franz Kafkas Sorgen mit der tschechischen Sprache.” Kafka and Prag. Eds. Kurt Krolopand H. D. Zimmerman. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994. 59. “Kennen Sie außer Ihrer Muttersprache nochandere Sprachen? Welche? Wie weit reichen Ihre Kenntnisse darin? Können Sie diese Sprachen bloßverstehen oder auch sprechen, oder sich ihrer auch schriftlich bei Übersetzungen und Aufsätzenbedienen?”5 .ermak 1994, 59. “Böhmisch, außerdem französisch und englisch, doch bin ich in den beiden letztenSprachen außer Übung.”6 Letter to the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt on June 30, 1908. Marek Nekula: Franz KafkasSprachen: “...in einem Stockwerk des innern babylonischen Turmes...”. Tübingen: Max NiemeyerVerlag, 2003. 2. “Der Petent ist der deutschen und böhmischen Sprache in Wort und Schrift mächtig,beherrscht ferner die französische, teilweise die englische Sprache.”49

through a rhetoric of distance, rather than, say, of practice and proficiency. The tentative,intimate tone from the previous year has dissolved beneath a spatial metaphor oflinguistic power, partial sovereignty, and proximity, in which some languages are“closer,” some “farther” from the writer’s command. The Assicurazioni Generaliquestionnaire prompt itself—“How far does your knowledge [of other languages]reach?”—seems all but ready-made for the young author’s figural repertoire.Such was Kafka’s narrative language when giving an account of his ownmultilinguality in early professional life: the arid tropes of interoffice communiqué,where affect remained ossified in spatial metaphor. Indeed, he was generating this kind of“paper German” at the same time as he was composing his first philosophical fictionsabout cross-linguistic interactions. From The Missing Person (1911–1914) and “In thePenal Colony” (1914) to “An Old Manuscript” (1919) and “The Animal in OurSynagogue” (1922), Kafka’s texts deform the monolingual bias of which they are aproduct. They erect linguistic spaces where proximity to the origo of narration signifieslinguistic mastery, while cross-language dilemmas are figured through distance. Thoughthe analysis that follows will interweave Kafka’s properly fictional texts with hisotherwise figural writings (letters, diaries, etc.). It is not the primary goal of this chapterto survey Kafka’s thoughts about multilinguality as a topic, nor to put forth abiographical sketch of his experiences of language acquisition and attrition over the fourdecades of his life. Scholars such as Josef .ermak, Anthony Northy, and Marek Nekulahave even-handedly addressed these long-standing lacunae in the secondary literature. 77 Josef .ermak 1994. Anthony Northy. “Die Kafkas: Juden? Christen, Tschechen? Deutsche?” Kafka andPrag. Eds. Kurt Krolop and H. D. Zimmerman. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994, 11-32. Marek Nekula, Ingrid50

Though my analysis relies on this emerging and scrupulous body of research on Kafka’slinguistic livelihood, its ultimate stakes lie elsewhere—in an arena of inquiry that is lessbiographical than, perhaps, linguagraphical. In what guise do languages, other languages,break into Kafka’s famously monolingual German compositions? And what is theirbusiness there?Such an inquiry joins up with a growing contingent of researchers who embraidKafka’s fictional works within other semiotic fields—including Mark Anderson onfashion and accessories, John Zilcosky on colonial travel, Hans Zischler on movie-going,and Peter Rehberg on laughter. 8 The current chapter points to monolingualism as anothersuch discursive field in which Kafka’s texts are embedded—or more specifically, to thestrife between monolingual mandates and multilingual phenomena in his fictional worlds.It represents a late but inevitable addition to the seachange in Kafka research sinceDeleuze and Guattari’s potent 1975 “small literature” intervention, a corrective post-ColdWar movement that David Damrosch reports under the heading “Kafka Comes Home.” 9Kafka: Mono- or Multi 10It is surprisingly difficult to establish an analytical foundation for Kafka’smultilingualism within a German Studies framework, given the bearing of Kafka studiesFleischmann, Albrecht Greule. Eds. Franz Kafka im sprachnationalen Kontext seiner Zeit: Sprache undnationale Identitat in öffentlichen Institutionen der böhmischen Länder. Cologne: Böhlau, 2007.8 Mark Anderson. Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Hapsburg Fin de Siecle. New York:Clarendon, 1992. John Zilcosky. Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing.New York: Palgrave, 2003. Hanns Zischler. Kafka Goes to the Movies. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Peter Rehberg. Lachen lesen: zur Komik der Moderne beiKafka. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007.9 Deleuze and Guattari 1986. David Damrosch. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2003. 187. Pascale Casanova. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 270–273.10 Günther Anders. Kafka: Pro & Contra. Munich: Beck, 1951.51

from 1924 to the end of the Cold War. After the Third Reich fell in 1945, the Kafka ofGermanistik accrued such exemplary status on both sides of the Atlantic that his writingsbecame a kind of international test palette for the modern German language. 11 Since then,it has been routine in critical reception to nod approvingly to Kafka’s many “other”languages as a well-kept menagerie of intellectual talents. Klaus Wagenbach’sbiographical sketches are primarily to thank, for example, for Kafka’s fame as a flawlessGerman-Czech bilingual. Consider Wagenbach’s windy story from the 1964 biography:He was the only one [among Prague’s German authors] to speak and write almostimpeccable Czech, he was the only one to grow up right in the middle of the oldtown, on the edge of the ghetto district, which was then still an architectonic unity.Kafka never lost his intimate bond to the Czech people; he never forgot this milieuof his youth. 12This polyglot portraiture has two drawbacks: one biographical and one social. First, intreating Czech-German bilingualism as a mark of literary genius, Wagenbach’s zeal forsuperlativity abets an arbitrary class distinction between Prague’s intellectual polyglotsand its “functionally” multilingual workers and merchants. Second, Wagenbach’s tributeglosses over Kafka’s changing relationship to the languages he knew and continued tolearn over the course of his life—his ambitions, doubts, failures, and dissimulations inregards to them. This image of an additive polyglot Franz Kafka laid the trap for a gamutof critical equivocations in midcentury German Studies.11 Stephen Dowden. Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Imagination. Columbia: Camden House, 1995.12 Klaus Wagenbach. Franz Kafka. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991. 17. “Als einziger [der PragerDeutscher Schriftsteller] sprach und schrieb er fast fehlerlos Tschechisch, als einziger wuchs er mittenin der Altstadt auf, an der Grenze zum damals noch als architektonische Einheit bestehendenGettobezirk. Niemals hat Kafka die enge Bindung zum tschechischen Volk verloren, niemals dieseAtmosphäre seiner Jugend vergessen.”52

As a consequence of his canonization as a defensible German modernist in the post-War period, the languages Kafka “further commanded” were set aside as extra-textual,biographical matter. His persistent devotion to Czech, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Italianand French garnered acknowledgement from critics only to the extent that they indicatedan anti-totalitarian ethics or the necessary accoutrements of a genial mind. Its moraltimbre notwithstanding, Wagenbach’s remembrance gives us a sense for how personal, asopposed to situated, multilinguality tends to play into literary hagiography in general. 13As the other language, Czech functioned here as an authentication device and a species ofethical capital. Until recently in Kafka studies, the author’s multilinguality continued toserve this chiastic function: his other languages remained central to the compositebiographical sketch, yet still remained irrelevant to critical readings of his texts.The two ends of the language-critical project in Kafka reception were carried by 1)those philosophically concerned with Language as constitutive of the human conditionand 2) observers of style, for whom language was the stuff of poetic exemplarity. EvenKafka’s texts that highlight the use of many languages, like The Missing Person and Inthe Penal Colony met with critical interpretations that relied on a unitary conception oflanguage. 14The latter, stylistic orientation to Kafka’s language coalesced into a critical traditionno later than the author’s death in 1924. Language as Style quickly became a first port-ofcallfor devotees, feuilletonists, and disseminators of the recently deceased author’spublished and unpublished works. An aura of exemplarity got its footing in Max Brod’s13 Kellman 2004.14 Stanley Corngold. “Allotria and Excreta in ‘In the Penal Colony’.” Modernism / Modernity 8.1 (2001):281-293. 281.53

obituary for Kafka in the Prager Tageblatt on June 4, 1924, where Brod staked out analmost oracular legacy for the prose stylist, whose texts he was himself in the midst ofredacting. In the second paragraph of the obituary, Brod hastened to foreground Kafka’slanguage as a hallmark of stylistic restraint and of a rigorous relationship to truth:Here is truth and nothing but. Take for instance his language! Those cheap devices(spinning new words and word combinations, shell-games with sentence syntax,etc)—he disdains them. “Disdain“ is not even the right word. They are inaccessibleto him, just as rhymes cannot gain access to that which is impure; they areforbidden, taboo. His language is crystal clear, and on its surface one notices noother pursuit than to be appropriate, clear, and right in regards to its object. And yetdreams, visions of unfathomable depth move beneath this pure brook of language. 15Here Brod seems to harvest the trope of inaccessibility from Kafka’s own texts, recastingit, of all things, as a gatekeeper between the author and bad style. Brod suggests here thatKafka was by nature incapable of gaining access to the decadent devices of modernism’sludic language, tending by constitution toward inconspicuous clarity instead. To upholdthis virtue, Kafka carefully surpassed those decadent wordy devices that estrange textsfrom their immediate objects.Thus eulogized, Kafka could not do otherwise than use (German) language purely.Brod’s metaphor of access—that of the rhyme-ready word immune to the advances ofunruly, wayward words—is all the more striking when placed alongside Kafka’s shorttext “Before the Law,” which first appeared in the Jewish weekly Selbstwehr in 1915.15 Jürgen Born, ed. Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption 1924–1938. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983. 16.“Hier ist Wahrheit und nichts als sie. Nehmt beispielsweise seine Sprache! Die billigen Mittel (neueWorte zu drehen, Zusammensetzungen, Rochade der Satzteile usw.), diese Mittel verschmäht er.‘Verschmäht’ ist nicht einmal das richtige Wort. Sie sind ihm unzugänglich, wie eben dem ReinenUnreines unzugänglich, verboten, tabu ist. Seine Sprache ist kristallklar, und an der Oberfläche merktman gleichsam kein anderes Bestreben als richtig, deutlich, dem Gegenstand angemessen zu sein. Unddoch ziehen Träume, Vision von unermesslicher Tiefe unter dem heiteren Spiegel dieses reinen Sprach-Bachs.”54

Where Brod contended that Kafka lacked access to impure language, Baum foregroundsthe author’s chaste adherence to the law of inconspicuousness. It was on this basis thatWilla and Edwin Muir painstakingly assembled a culture-transcending author for Anglo-American audiences during a period when fascism precluded all but a handful of Germanspeakers from encountering his texts. 19 As translators like Mark Harmon begin to walkback the Muirs’ anti-localist stylistics of clarity, the results are quite striking:The tempo of the prose reflects K.'s inner state. When K. is agitated, it is choppy.When K. loses himself in the labyrinth of his paranoid logic, it is tortuous andwordy. At times, Kafka's language parodies the convoluted jargon of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, which he encountered daily through his job as an insuranceofficial. A key chapter depicts a fateful encounter between K. and the officialBürgel: just as K. is offered a momentous opportunity, he dozes off, understandablyenough, since Bürgel is droning on in almost impenetrable pseudo-officialese, whichI have tried to make as murky in English as it is in German. Elsewhere, however,the narrative presses forward relentlessly. At such moments, Kafka's stark prosebecomes a miracle of precision. As the novel progresses, the lightly punctuatedwriting becomes increasingly fluid, culminating in a barmaid's breathless speech. 20Broad attributions about Kafka’s superlative linguistic clarity thrive to the present day. Arecent collection of essays, Kontinent Kafka, for example, crowns his collected works the“drawing table of the modern Western world par excellence.” 21 Given that Kafka’sfictional works were written in German only, this claim depluralizes the range oflanguages and sign systems that oversaw Kafka’s world, not to mention the “modernWestern world” in the early twentieth century.19 Damrosch 2003, 189.20 Mark Harman. “Digging in the Pit of Babel.” New Literary History 27.2 (1996): 291–311. 294.21 Klaus Scherpe, ed. Kontinent Kafka. Berlin: Vorwerk, 2006. 10. “Die Zeichenfläche der modernenwestlichen Welt schlechthin.”56

Amid a Double MonolingualismBarriers to analyzing how Kafka’s day-to-day multilingualism shaped his writing stilllinger in the secondary literature, where “language” tends to be writ large, and singular.Though there are good literary-historical justifications for an anthropological anxietyabout language around the turn of the last century, the social history of linguisticborderlands like Prague indicate an overriding set of societal concerns.High modernism and its crises of articulation had understood language as a speciesdefining,yet folly-ridden aspect of the human condition. This binding, deficient finitudeof words found its emblem in Hugo von Hofmanthal’s 1902 Chandos letter, whereAbstract words, of which the tongue must naturally partake in order to bring forthany judgment, fell apart in my mouth like mildewy mushrooms. 22While the dramatic decay of abstract Language came to define the literary epoch in whichKafka was active, dilemmas arising between speakers of different languages were notseen as epistemically consequential for literature. As Hokenson and Munson suggest,“Bilinguality seems to be the one category of language-user that high modernist thoughtdid not, indeed perhaps even refused to, consider.” 23 But the monolingual literaryhistoricalpedestal upon which Kafka’s multilinguality was stored throughout the ColdWar did not do justice to the cultural terrain of Prague around 1900, where language hadbeen the trump card in most local political disputes in the late 19 th century. As Nekulawrites:22 Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben. Prosa II. Ed. Herbert Steiner. Frankfurtam Main: Fischer, 1976. 7–20. “Die abstrakten Worte, deren sich doch die Zunge naturgemäß bedienenmuss, um irgendwelches Urtheil an den Tag zu geben, zerfielen mir im Munde wie modrige Pilze.”23 Hokenson 2007, 148.57

For the Czech and German middle classes, language-based nationalism dominatedall other values; it determined the political program of most Czech and Germanpolitical parties, as well as more private choices, such as where parents sent theirchildren to schools. Czech middle-class nationalists demanded that the Czechlanguage and Czech people be given equal standing with the Germans, whileGerman middle-class nationalists wanted to maintain the status quo. Both groupswere becoming more and more interested in creating linguistically distinct spaces. 24Public semiotics in the city flourished amid what could be called a doublemonolingualism, by which each of two dominant monolingual ideologies tacticallymisrecognized the existence of the other. 25 Marek Nekula describes how the naming ofPrague monuments, bridges, and districts in the 19 th century rested almost exclusively onthe battle between Czech and German nationalism. When a Czech national majority tookcontrol of the city council in 1860, funds were appropriated for the Czech NationalTheater, the Palacky Bridge, a Jan Hus monument, and other public Hussite icons thatwould promote Czech national narratives for future generations. Nekula describes how,though Kafka’s fictional texts do not reference Prague explicitly, their figurations ofpublic space are sites of intransigent struggle over naming, typical of contested Czech-German urban landmarks. While editing The Castle, for example, Kafka graduallyremoved local landmarks and attributes—like the simple vertical tombstones of the OldJewish Cemetery—that might have invited Prague-specific readings of the novel. 26 Yeteven in the absence of localizing details, Kafka’s textual cityscapes shimmer withPrague’s highly charged double monolingualism.24 Nekula 2007.25 Judson 2006.26 Nekula 2007.58

The highly contentious language politics of late 19 th century Prague were not thenatural consequence of adverse language contact alone, but rather of the concerted effortsof urban nationalists to establish and maintain linguistically pure spaces. “In multilingualvillages, towns, or regions, early political movements attempted to mobilize popularsupport by demanding linguistic equality for their side. As political conflicts developedaround language issues, representatives of each “side” scoured the region for everypotential voter, attempting to mobilize nationally indifferent people into nationalistpolitical parties.” 27 As Judson describes, the 19 th century Bohemian crownlands ofKafka’s forebears were more a battleground between urban, political monolingualism andrural, apolitical multilingualism than between Czech speakers and German speakers. Themanifest multilingualism that urban partisan electioneers encountered in the countrysideof Bohemia and Moravia was fundamentally resistant to nationalization. Judsoncontinues:Phenomena such as bilingualism, apparent indifference to national identity, andnationally opportunist behaviors expressed the fundamental logic of local cultures inmultilingual regions, a logic that neither nationalist activism nor so-calledmodernization processes were capable of destroying. 28The Chauvinist Has Lost His WayCzech was the commercial language of Hermann Kafka’s store, and Franz expressed aconstant desire to communicate in his father’s Czech in a variety of situations. He longedto dialogue and correspond in Czech with his fiancée Milena, to whom he wrote thefollowing in 1920: “I’ve often wanted to ask you why you don’t write in Czech. Certainly27 Judson 2006, 9.28 Judson 2006, 3.59

not because you haven’t mastered German […] I always wanted to read Czech from you,because you belong to it, because only there [dort] is the entire Milena to be found. […]So Czech, please…” The letter continues wistfully about how the name Milena soundslike the offspring of a “a Greek or Roman who lost his way, ended up in Bohemia, andraped the Czech language.” 29On those occasions when Milena did write to Kafka in Czech, he could retell thecontents of the letters to her with ease, and he offered astutely differentiated correctionsto her Czech translation of the first chapter of his first novel The Missing Person, addingin the margins complex insights about connotation and style that Czech native speakersmight not notice. 30Scattered throughout Kafka’s diaries, especially between 1911–1913, is a notion thatlinguistic plurality has the power to rob nation-states of their illusive univocality andcoherence as “imagined communities.” 31 Being unable to understand an interlocutorindicated, in this schema, that the nation had failed in its “chauvinistic” task ofpurification. Jotting down the gist of one letter from Max Brod, Kafka noted “Confusionof languages as the solution to national difficulties” in which “the chauvinist can no29 .ermak 1994, 60. “Schon einigermale wollte ich Sie fragen, warum Sie nicht einmal tschechischschreiben. Nicht etwa deshalb, weil Sie das Deutsche nicht beherrschten […] Aber tschechisch wollteich von Ihnen lesen, weil Sie ihm doch angehören, weil doch nur dort die ganze Milena ist […] AlsoTschechisch, bitte...” / “Grieche oder Römer [der] nach Böhmen verirrt [und] tschechisch vergewaltigt[hat].”30 .ermak 1994, 243.31 Anderson 1991.60

longer find his way.” 32 Brod’s letter described the preponderant multilingual in the Swisscanton of Uri as follows:In the men’s room. Too crowded. Signs in extraordinarily many languages.—Solution of the language question in Switzerland. Everything has been confused, sothat even the chauvinists cannot find their way. Soon comes the German languageon the left, then right, soon again together with French or Italian or with both oreven English, and then it is absent. In Flüelen, the tracks forbade in German-Italian.Autos drive slow in German-French. Switzlerland in its entirety: school forstatesmen! 33Yet multilingualism as political panacea had its downsides in the private realm. Often,while on sick-leave, Kafka needed to write to his supervisor in Czech to ask for anextension of his rest-cure. He turned to his sister Ottla and her husband David Joseph fortranslation assistance, explaining in one particular case that: “I am forgetting Czech here.The issue is that this is classical Czech; the words aren’t the problem […] but rather theirclassicalness.” 34 This admission seems to include two separate claims: 1) He hadforgotten Czech as a whole, as in a process of generalized language loss, or 2) He hadnever mastered the classical register of Czech corresponding to the letter Kafka needed tocompose. In those cases that he received translation assistance from David Joseph, Kafka32 Franz Kafka. Reisetagebücher in der Fassung der Handschrift. Ed. H. G. Koch. Frankfurt am Main:Fischer, 1994. “Verwirrung der Sprachen als Lösung nationaler Schwierigkeiten” / “Der Chauvinistkennt sich nicht mehr aus.”33 Franz Kafka. Reisetagebücher in der Fassung der Handschrift. Ed. H. G. Koch. Frankfurt am Main:Fischer, 1994. 123. “Im Männerbad. Sehr überfüllt. Aufschriften in unregelmäßig vielen Sprachen.—Lösung der Sprachenfrage in der Schweiz. Man verwirrt alles, so dass sich die Chauvinisten selbst nichtauskennen. Bald ist das Deutsche links, bald rechts, bald mit Französisch oder Italienisch verbundenoder mit beiden oder selbst englisch, bald fehlt es. In Fluelen war das Verbieten der Geleise: Deutschitalienisch.Das Langsamfahren der Autos: Deutsch-französisch.—Überhaupt die Schweiz als Schuleder Staatsmänner!”34 Franz Kafka. Briefe an Ottla und die Familie. Eds. H. Binder and K. Wagenbach. Frankfurt am Main:Fischer, 1974. 101. “ Ich vergesse hier Tschechisch. Es kommt vor allem darauf an, dass es klassischesTschechisch ist, also gar nicht auf Wörtlichkeit…nur auf Klassizität.”61

often smuggled a few authenticating errors into the proofread copy afterwards, in order toavoid arousing suspicion from his business associates.In another diary entry, Kafka recalled an encounter at the home of one of his father’sCzech-speaking clients, an episode that countervails the transcendent or theologicalnotion of the “unsayable” in Kafka’s fiction. Remembering the cross-lingual situation inthe narrative present tense, he writes:The less success I have with my Czech suasions [….] the more cat-like his facebecomes. Finally, I play a bit with a very satisfied feeling, I look around the roomspeechlessly with a long face and narrowed eyes, as if following something onlyhinted at into the unsayable […] My argumentation too abstract and formal. Amistake not to beckon the wife into the room. 35Of particular interest in this diary entry is Kafka’s feigned gesture, of following“something only hinted at into the unsayable.” From Benjamin to /i0ek, 36 such aformulation routinely inspires mystical or metalinguistic readings, in which meaningtranscends particular languages. This context calls however for greater attention to theconcrete, cross-linguistic situation in which the author found himself—at a loss, not formeaning or words as such, but for Czech words. Faced with the client’s overt disapprovalat his own communicative competence in Czech, the surrogate salesman couches hislinguistic difficulties in an earnest search for genial expression. This face-saving gesture35 Kafka 1992, 84. “Je weniger ich mit meinem tschechischen Zureden Erfolg habe […] destokatzenmäßiger wird sein Gesicht. Ich spiele gegen Schluss ein wenig mit sehr behaglichem Gefühl, soschaue ich mit etwas langgezogenem Gesicht und verkleinerten Augen stumm im Zimmer herum alsverfolgte ich etwas Angedeutetes ins Unsagbare. […] Meine Argumentation stellenweise zu abstraktund formell. Fehler die Frau nicht ins Zimmer gerufen zu haben.”36 Slavoj /i0ek. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Boston: MITPress, 1991. 150.62

allows the speaker to demonstrate, in plain view of the situation’s other participants, thathis speechlessness is justified.This glimpse into Kafka’s own dissimulative tactics in spoken Czech confirmsNekula’s and .ermak’s extensive analyses, which illustrate a language proficiency towhich the terms native and non-native do not seem to apply. Kafka’s Czech was, in theseaccounts, an idiosyncratic yet fluent mix of heterogeneous speech genres, includingbureaucratic Czech and oral-based slang usages, as well as some prepositionalconstructions modeled after German. 37 As such, Czech was a liminal threshold for Kafka,a code into which he was born but one into which he was never fully initiated. In a letterto Ottla shortly before his death in 1924, Kafka reflected ruefully: “What should I, poorboy, do now, now that I have brought the lie of my magnificent Czech into the world, alie that probably no one believes?” 38Lingua non Grata: The Specter of YiddishIf Czech was a language that Kafka commanded, desired, and expressed solidarity with,Yiddish presented an even more quizzical dilemma. Like Czech, Yiddish was a liminallanguage for Kafka, representing a lived threshold between two adverse social worlds.Complicating this state of affairs was its contested claim to existence in the first place. Inthe Hapsburg imperial census of December 31, 1900, Yiddish was not counted as anational or vernacular language among the eight officially recognized languages of theEmpire. The demographic data on Jews disseminated in the first decade of the century37 .ermak 1994, 64.38 “Was soll ich aber armer Junge […] jetzt tun, nachdem ich nun schon einmal die Lüge meinesprachtvollen Tschechisch, eine Lüge, die wahrscheinlich niemand glaubt, in die Welt gesetzt habe.”.ermak 1994, 63.63

therefore counted Yiddish-speakers as German-speakers, leading to a portrayal of Jews inthe crownlands as the vanguard of the German language, far outnumbering thecorresponding numbers of German-speaking Christians. A plurality of those Jewscounted as such were not German speakers at all, yet the census apparatus had no way todistinguish between Yiddish and German. The article “The Vernacular of the Jews inAustria” [Die Umgangssprache der Juden in Osterreich] which appeared in the 1905Journal for Demography and Statistics among Jews [Zeitschrift für Demographie undStatisttik der Juden] characterized Jewish language practices as follows:If one takes the Crownlands alone, there is a preference for German among theJews. 17.1% of Jews in Galicia spoke German, only 1.1% of Christians, in Bukowina95.5% of Jewish but only 10.6% of Christians, in Bohemia 43.7% of Jews and36.9% of Christians. 39The demographer was Heinrich Rauchberg, chair of Popular Law and Statistics at theGerman University of Prague. Franz Kafka attended Rauchberg’s lectures, including oneon “General and Austrian Statistics” during the 1905 summer semester. Because of theirlegal designation as monolingual German speakers, Jews were considered thespokespeople for the German language abroad [im Ausland]. In the Quarterly for theAssociation for Germanness Abroad [Vierteljahrsheft des Vereins für das Deutschtum imAusland] Zionist social scientists, such as Davis Trietsch, wrote about Jews and Germansbeyond German territory as a “community of interest.” A crucial aspect of Trietsch’s self-39 Nekula 2007, 61. “Nimmt man die Kronländer einzeln, so ergibt sich in ihnen sämtlich eine Bevorzugungdes Deutschen bei den Juden. So sprechen […] Deutsch als Umgangssprache in Galizien 17,1% allerJuden, nur 1,1% aller Christen, in der Bukowina 95,5% aller Juden, aber nur 10,6% aller Christen, inBöhmen 43,7% aller Juden und 36,9% aller Christen…”64

described “Zionist Maximalism” is this claim of universal command of German amongJews. 40Such misrecognitions of Yiddish were, of course, no clerical or empirical error.Already in 1871, Kaiser Josef II had decreedthat Jews should be prohibited from using that language of theirs which is cobbledtogether from Hebrew and German with a few Chaldean words, such that Jews shallpartake of no languages in their official and unofficial business and in allconnections that concern them other than German and Bohemian. 41Barely acknowledged as a language, Yiddish was an official target of annihilation, alegally proscribed hypotext for Kafka’s textual compositions. A political impulse aboutYiddish seizes Kafka’s imagination in the years before World War I. In a notation fromOctober 1911, he recounts one of his many return visits to Löwy’s Yiddish theaterperformance during that year:The desire to see a great Yiddish theater, as this performance seems to have faileddue to the small cast and imprecise production. Also the desire to know Yiddishliterature, to which has clearly been ascribed a posture of tireless national strugglethat informs every work. A stance that no literature, even that of the most repressedpeople, demonstrates in this continuous way. Perhaps in times of war it happens anational literature of struggle emerges among other peoples, and other more remoteworks take on a national countenance thanks to the enthusiasm of the listeners—asin the case of The Bartered Bride. Here, though, only work of the former kind seemsto exist, and permanently so. 4240 Davis Trietsch. “Von den Sprachverhältnissen der Juden.” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik derJuden (1915): 75–80.41 Willibald Müller. Urkundliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der mährischen Judenschaft. Olmütz: Kullil,1903. 179. “dass den Juden der Gebrauch ihrer aus dem Hebräischen und Deutsch zusammengesetzten,mit chaldäischen Worten vermischtne Sprache dergestalt untersagt werde, dass die Juden in allenVerbindungen nach sich ziehenden, sowohl gerichtlichen, als außergerichtlichen Handlungen usw. sichkeiner anderen Sprache als der deutschen oder böhmischen bedienen sollen.”42 Kafka 1992, 68. “Wunsch, ein großes jiddisches Teater zu sehen, da die Aufführung doch vielleicht andem kleinen Personal und ungenauer Einstudierung leidet. Auch der Wunsch, die jiddische Literatur zu65

From 1911–1913, Kafka’s diaries show a longing to experience the Yiddish theater as anentirety, as a linguistic expression of national struggle.That Yiddish did not exist as an official category affected how Kafka would depict itamong his friends and colleagues. His 1913 introductory lecture for a visiting EasternJewish theater troupe begins by suggesting how Yiddish is both threatening and familiarto the Germans that overhear it. The following passage from his speech may beunderstood as a backhanded gauntlet-throw toward the intellectual Jewish-Germanaudience, for whom Yiddish tended to signal the provincialism of past generations.Standing before the assembled members of the Bar Kochba to introduce Löwy’s dramaticreadings of Yiddish lyric, Kafka forewarned them that any attention they might lend tothe differences between Yiddish and German will only bring them unnecessary hardshipand dismay.We are living in a downright pleasant harmony; we understand one another when itis necessary, we get along without each other when it suits us and understand eachother even then. Who, amid such a state of affairs, could ever understand theconfused jargon, or who would even feel like doing so? 43Kafka’s devil’s advocate stance toward his audience’s zeal for the exotic yet familiarsounds of Yiddish sets up a potential rite of initiation, a threshold between languages thatthe audience ought to think twice about before crossing. For Kafka, listening attentivelykennen, der offenbar einer ununterbrochene nationale Kampfstellung zugewiesen ist, die jedes Werkbestimmt. Eine Stellung also, die keine Literatur auch die des unterdrücktesten Volkes in dieserdurchgängigen Weise hat. Vielleicht geschieht es bei andern Völkern in Kampfzeiten, daß die nationalekämpferische Literatur hochkommt und andere fernstehende Werke durch die Begeisterung der Zuhörereinen in diesem Sinne nationalen Schein bekommen wie z.B. die verkaufte Braut, hier scheinen abernur die Werke der ersten Art und zwar dauernd zu bestehen.”43 Kafka 1992, 118. “Wir leben in einer geradezu fröhlichen Eintracht; verstehen einander, wenn esnotwendig ist, kommen ohne einander aus, wenn es uns passt und verstehen einander selbst dann; werkönnte aus einer solchen Ordnung der Dinge heraus den verwirrten Jargon verstehen oder wer hätteauch die Lust dazu?”66

for the differences embedded in, and symbolic distances conjured by, spoken Yiddishoffers questionable returns. Why should they want to know the difference? Why shouldthe difficult plurality of meanings beneath translingual homonyms be preferable to asyncretic reconciliation between cognates? Yiddish speech holds the potential to upsetthe monolingualist’s sense of “happy harmony”; it rescinds his entitlement to overlookmisunderstandings and gaps between the two languages. In the spirit of many of hisfictional works, Kafka here enacts a dramaturgical space of initiation between languages,a space in which the monolingualist is confronted, at a short distance, with a foreignlanguage that threatens to disrupt his authority over “his own” meanings.A Monolingualism ArtistWhy would a multiple-language speaker like Kafka become modernism’s monolingualistschlechthin? Responding to Sander Gilman’s rather severe take on this question, DavidSuchoff remarks with only slightly less opprobrium: “If Kafka, like Josef K., does bearany fault, it is for having checked his Jewish languages at the door of his canonicalGerman, which, as Sander Gilman put it, tempted him with the lure of literary fame.” 44But in sizing up Kafka’s vested interest in his own linguistic capital, Suchoff and Gilmanseem to suggest that being “bilingual in everything but his writing” was a matter of sheeropportunism. If, on the other hand, one were to view monolingualism as a meta-formalconstraint of modern national literatures that Kafka both recognized and accepted, hisendeavor to project his multilingualism—through the “door” of paper German looksmore like a critical intervention than a sin of omission.44 Suchoff 2003, 255.67

Living in a multilingual provincial capital of a multinational empire, Kafka boundhimself and his readers to a monolingual contract—purified of calques, code-switching,and other ostentatious other-language traces. Cognizant himself of this field of tensions,Kafka developed a mode of hyperbolic monolinguality. While the poets of the GeorgeCircle were honing a panlingual lyric style, Kafka’s texts abstain from all other-languagesigns, preferring to figure the ascetics of monolingualism through spatial parables like“Returning Home,” “Before the Law”, and “Er.”The impeccable, even devout, compositional clarity that amazed Brod, Baum, andPick is best attributed not to Kafka’s relationship to Language as such, but to his effort toforeground pure German monolinguality as a phantasmagoria, a series of illusory,artificial signs. In his study of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, Gary Saul Morson writesthat “It might almost be said that rumor is the main character.”[Dostoyevsky] typically reports a range of rumors, doubts his own best sources, andobsessively offers alternative possibilities. “Some say,” “others affirm,” “it is absurdto suppose,” “now everyone at the club believed with the utmost certainty,” “it ismaintained in all seriousness”—these and countless similar expressions give each ofhis accounts an aura of endless alternatives and an air of unresolvable enigmas. 45While rumor had been, for Morson, the hidden hand in the event landscapes of War andPeace and Crime and Punishment, monolingualism may be understood figurally in Kafkaas a spatial constraint, a metric of internality and externality within the narrated space, atemple where uninvited animals, nomads, and pilferers routinely seek to settle.45 Morson 1998, 606.68

The Missing Person (1911–1914)We have room for but one language here, and thatis the English language, for we intend to see thatthe crucible turns our people out as Americans,and American nationality, not as dwellers in apolyglot boarding house.—President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt, 1914The first American poem that Karl was able torecite to his uncle one evening, a depiction of aconflagration, made the latter deeply serious withcontentment.—Franz Kafka, The Missing Person, 1914 46To a great extent, Kafka’s first novel presents a telling anomaly in his figural engagementwith multilingualism. If “Returning Home” and other short texts sketch out crampedspaces on the “here” side of the monolingual threshold, Kafka’s first unfinished novel—variously translated as The Stow-Away, The Missing Person, America, or The Man WhoDisappeared—is textual attempt to inhabit the multilingual world “over there,” beyondthe multilingual threshold. It will be, I claim, Kafka’s one and only sustained literaryfiction that delights in camping on the “far side” of the monolingual/multilingual divide.Nonetheless, we will remember that Karl Rossmann, the novel’s ambitious young hero,languishes in the endless narrow corridors of the oceanliner that brought him toAmerica—unwilling to disembark into the English-speaking space that awaited him.As its title suggests, the subject of the narrative has “disappeared” from an implicithome-space in Prague. Thus the German title Der Verschollene, chosen by Kafkahimself, encapsulates a more extreme spatial metaphor than any of the four Englishtranslations. Unlike a “vermisste Person” [“a missing person”] who might be redeemed46 Franz Kafka. Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe: Der Verschollene. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983. 62. “Daserste amerikanische Gedicht, die Darstellung einer Feuersbrunst, das Karl seinem Onkel an einemAbend rezitieren konnte, machte diesen tiefernst vor Zufriedenheit.”69

through concerted rescue efforts, a verschollene Person is like a sailor drowned, or lost,at sea. For Karl, there is no return—he is lost to an other-language space.At once the most progressive and Bildungsroman-like among Kafka’s narratives, thisbootstrapping immigrant adventure tale evinces few of the stumbles and apoplexies thatplague (or constitute) the heroes of Kafka’s later novels. Karl appears young, kinetic, andimpatient—ready to devour Amerika in one serving. The unfinished text nonethelessconsists of a series of lateral exasperations disguised as accomplishments, as KarlRossman pawns his way around a disfigured America in search of the social entitlementhe was raised to expect back in Prague. Recent scholarship has variously conceived KarlRossman’s ambitious wanderlust as a tactic to stave off the onset of adult masculinity, 47as the first sustained spatial-topographical turn in Kafka’s fiction, 48 and an exploration ofcultural Zionism. 49 In a more language-oriented vein, David Suchoff suggests that “Karl’scomic failure to fit into high society is far from tragic; it is the pleasurable drama of theschlemiel who mocks official culture, breaking its spell and gesturing instead toward thesilenced pleasures of immigrant speech.” 50And indeed this speech is silenced amid Kafka’s assiduously canonical German, andKarl’s confrontation with the English language remains a lingering dilemma of47 Elizabeth Boa. “Karl Rossman, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: The Flight from Manhood inKafka’s Der Verschollene.” Eds. Mary Orr and Lesley Sharpe. From Goethe to Gide: Feminism,Aesthetics and the Literary Canon in France and Germany, 1770–1936. Exeter: University of ExeterPress, 2005. 168–83.48 Christine Ivanovic. “Amerika, Kafkas verstoßener Sohn: Deterritorialisierung und ‘topographic turn’ inThe Missing Person.” Eds. Jochen Vogt and Alexander Stephan. Das Amerika der Autoren: Von Kafkabis 09/11. Munich: Fink, 2006. 45–65.49 Joseph Metz. “Zion in the West: Cultural Zionism, Diasporic Doubles, and the ‘Direction’ of JewishLiterary Identity in Kafka’s Der Verschollene.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaftund Geistesgeschichte 78.4 (2004): 646–71.50 Suchoff 2003, 263.70

epresentation for the text. Who speaks English and when, with what accents and fluency,and how can this be indexed in a monolingual German-language text? How fast can Karl,freshly disembarked in New York harbor with only rudimentary schooling in foreignlanguages, speak an American English that doesn’t require the novel’s readers to suspenddisbelief? How much delay will this problem cause Kafka in composing his first novel—a text predicated on the premise of a cross-language journey?Karl tells his own language biography in the following terms: he doesn’t regretdropping out of school, because “everything that I could have known would have beentoo little for the Americans.” He had missed the advent of modern language teaching inhis school, and though his father wanted him to be taught English, his other subjectscrowded it out. “I couldn’t anticipate back then the misfortune that would come over meand how much I would need English.” His adverse position vis-à-vis English causes himto be dependent on his expatriate bilingual uncle, a narrative device in the text that allowsKarl’s code-switching between English and German to remain unspecified in the earlysections of the text.To a certain extent—and in contrast to later texts like The Castle and The Trial—thisearly novel betrays a carefree love affair with language acquisition that seems all butKafkaesque. The unproblematic triumphalism that characterizes Karl’s initial approach toEnglish is clear from the outset:Of course, learning English was Karl’s first and most important task. A youngprofessor at a business college appeared every morning at seven in Karl’s room andfound him already at his writing table with his notebooks, or memorizing as hepaced back and forth across the room. Karl apparently understood: as far as the71

acquisition of English was concerned, no haste was too great, and making rapidadvancement was the best way to make his uncle extraordinarily happy. 51Almost a reassuring footnote to the reader, such topical digressions about languagesuggest that his deficiencies in English will be nothing more than a quickly overcomesocial hurdle for Karl and a logical glitch for the narrative to resolve: how will Karl dothe kind of talking with his American comrades that can be represented in Kafka’s highlyregular prose? It is not inconsequential that Karl’s language learning is relegated to theliminal early hours of the day, before the brass tacks of life as a “fresh-baked American”[frischgebackener Amerikaner] get underway.And indeed, he succeeded. Whereas at first, in conversation with his uncle, Englishwas restricted to salutations and farewells, increasing portions of the conversationsplayed over into English, upon which more intimate topics began to arise. 52Problem solved? The text disposes of its own cross-lingual dilemma with the certainty ofa pamphlet advertising for a summer intensive-immersion program. Yet a pattern oftextual irritations in the novel undermines Karl’s (and the narrator’s) confidence aboutthe prospect of mastering English without adverse social consequences. At first, Karl’sburgeoning English proficiency means a growing, yet assisted, social mobility in NewYork:51 Kafka 1983, 61. “Natürlich war das Lernen des Englischen Karls erste und wichtigste Aufgabe. Einjunger Professor einer Handelshochschule erschien morgens um sieben Uhr in Karls Zimmer und fandihn schon an seinem Schreibtisch und bei den Heften sitzen oder memorierend im Zimmer auf und abgehen. Karl sah wohl ein, daß zur Aneignung des Englischen keine Eile groß genug sei und daß er hieraußerdem die beste Gelegenheit habe, seinem Onkel eine außerordentliche Freude durch rascheFortschritte zu machen.”52 Kafka 1983, 61. “Und tatsächlich gelang es bald, während zuerst das Englische in den Gesprächen mitdem Onkel sich auf Gruß und Abschiedsworte beschränkt hatte, immer größere Teile der Gespräche insEnglische hinüberzuspielen, wodurch gleichzeitig vertraulichere Themen sich einzustellen begannen. “72

The better Karl’s English became, the more pleasure his uncle showed in bringinghim together with his acquaintances, and only requested that, for the time being, theprofessor should stay close to Karl at such gatherings. 53The English professor is kept, prophylactically, at his side to complete Karl’s utterances,as they gradually move from the rudimentary to the semi-proficient. Soon, Karlundergoes the rite of consecration as an English speaker, for which he did not yetconsider himself worthy. At one of his uncle’s get-togethers:Amid the dead silence, Karl answered the group at length with a few sidelongglances at his uncle and tried to make himself agreeable with a somewhat NewYork–colored turn of phrase. Upon one particular expression, all three men laughedchaotically, and Karl feared that he had made a crude mistake; But no, he had, asMr. Pollunder explained, said something quite felicitous. 54This Mr. Pollunder is Karl’s first monolingual intimate, and Karl’s difficulty with hisEnglish speech is expressed in spatial terms. From the perspective of the GermanspeakingKarl, Pollunder’s house is figured as a treacherous space of deception andobscurantism: “He speaks, thought Karl, as if he knew nothing of the huge house, theendless hallways, the cupola, the empty rooms, the darkness everywhere.” 55 Karl’sestrangement and confusion in this labyrinthine English-speaking house present a starkcontrast to his German-speaking uncle’s house, which “appeared to him as somethingrigorously cohesive, that lay plain and empty before him, as if it were prepared just for53 Kafka 1983, 62. “Je besser Karls Englisch wurde, desto größere Lust zeigte der Onkel, ihn mit seinenBekannten zusammenzuführen, und ordnete nur für jeden Fall an, daß bei solchen Zusammenkünftenvorläufig der Englischprofessor sich immer in Karls Nähe zu halten habe.”54 Kafka 1983, 69. “Karl antwortete unter einer Sterbensstille ringsherum mit einigen Seitenblicken auf denOnkel ziemlich ausführlich und suchte sich zum Dank durch eine etwas New Yorkisch gefärbteRedeweise angenehm zu machen. Bei einem Ausdruck lachten sogar alle drei Herren durcheinander,und Karl fürchtete schon, einen groben Fehler gemacht zu haben; jedoch nein, er hatte, wie HerrPollunder erklärte, sogar etwas sehr Gelungenes gesagt.”55 Kafka 1983, 105. “’Er spricht,’ dachte Karl, ‘als wüßte er nicht von dem großen Haus, den endlosenGängen, der Kapelle, den leeren Zimmern, dem Dunkel überall.’”73

him and called out to him in a loud voice.” 56 The two spaces—one obscure, endless, andunknowable, the other unified, servile, and plaintive—correspond to the respectivespoken languages of their inhabitants.English is further characterized as a circuitous, labyrinthine endeavor, as Karl opts tohold his tutoring sessions while driving to riding practice: “Karl took the professor withhim in the automobile. During their English lesson, they drove mostly on detours,because too much time would have been lost had they driven directly through the trafficof the main street, which led right from the uncle’s house to the riding school,” 57 whereKarl would meet up with his first English-speaking friend Mack. Again, the dilemmasthat speaking English posed to Karl are displaced into spatial figurations: detours,indirect routes, and unexpected lateral excursions.Such is also the case when Karl needs to order some food in a hotel lobby. After somemoments of elaborate strategic deliberation, Karl decides to seek help from the mostapproachable looking woman on the hotel staff, in the hopes of a successful crosslanguagetransaction.Karl hadn’t even spoken to her, just stalked her a bit with his eyes, when she lookedover at Karl, just as one tends to glance sideways in the middle of a conversation.Interrupting her chat, she asked him—in an English as clear as grammar—if he waslooking for something.“Yes, indeed!” said Karl, “I can’t get anything here at all.” 5856 Kafka 1983, 108. “Es erschien ihm als etwas streng Zusammengehöriges, das leer, glatt und für ihnvorbereitet dalag und mit einer starken Stimme nach ihm verlangte.”57 Kafka 1983, 65. “Karl nahm dann den Professor mit ins Automobil, und sie fuhren zu ihrerEnglischstunde meist auf Umwegen, denn bei der Fahrt durch das Gedränge der großen Straße, dieeigentlich direkt von dem Hause des Onkels zur Reitschule führte, wäre zuviel Zeit verlorengegangen.”58 Kafka 1983, 156. “Karl hatte sie noch gar nicht angeredet, sondern nur ein wenig belauert, als sie, wieman eben manchmal mitten im Gespräch beiseiteschaut, zu Karl hinsah und ihn, ihre Rede74

In this interaction, the kind staffperson of this hotel seems to enact for Karl the Englishlanguage itself as a sublime whole, “clear as grammar.” Her address surprises the youngman, who had been mustering up the courage to speak to her in an American Englishregister appropriate for the setting. His response does not answer her question—whetherhe was looking for something—but describes a broader state of affairs subtending theirexchange: The “here” where he “can’t get anything” is equivalent to the sublimely tonedEnglish with which she addressed him and which he cannot reproduce. Barred fromsimulating anything but the most nativist speech patterns, the text indexes the linguisticimpasse in spatial-deictic terms instead.The hotel clerk’s response adopts Karl’s spatial idiom; she needs no furtherclarification of his intended meaning, steering him through an uncannily circuitous routeout of the public space of the hotel into a storage repository [Vorratskammer] hiddenaway in the bowels of the building:“Then come with me, dear,” she said, bid farewell to her acquaintance who tippedhis hat, which appeared here to be an unbelievable stroke of politeness, took Karl bythe hand, went to the buffet, shoved a guest to the side, opened a hatch in theconsole, traversed the hallway behind the console, where one had to be carefulamong the tirelessly running waiters, opened a second hatch, and there they foundthemselves in the great, cool storage repository. “One only needs to know themechanism,” said Karl to himself. 59unterbrechend, freundlich und in einem Englisch, klar wie die Grammatik, fragte, ob er etwas suche.“Allerdings” sagte Karl, “Ich kann hier gar nichts bekommen.”59 Kafka 1983, 156. “’Dann kommen Sie mit mir, Kleiner,’ sagte sie, verabschiedete sich von ihremBekannten, der seinen Hut abnahm, was hier wie unglaubliche Höflichkeit erschien, faßte Karl bei derHand, ging zum Büfett, schob einen Gast beiseite, öffnete eine Klapptüre im Pult, durchquerte denGang hinter dem Pult, wo man sich vor den unermüdlich laufenden Kellnern in acht nehmen mußte,öffnete eine zweite Tapetentüre, und schon befanden sie sich in großen, kühlen Vorratskammern. ‘Manmuß eben den Mechanismus kennen,’ sagte sich Karl.”75

What might have been, under another writer’s pen, a descriptive elaboration of crosslanguagenegotiation, misunderstanding, and metadiscursive reflection on thecommunicative exchange itself, appears in Kafka as a frenzied and kinetic crossing ofunknown thresholds—from public to semi-public, from apoplexy to intimate knowledgeof the “mechanism,” from appropriate comportment in the hotel lobby to “shoving”guests aside at the buffet table in order to get, urgently, from here to there.The Missing Person is one of the few Kafka texts that figuratively stage suchsuccessful cross-linguistic leaps and stunts, where the hero can justifiably pat himself onthe back for healthy intercultural dialogue. The failure to cross, or be dragged across,such thresholds is far more prevalent. Even The Missing Person, a textual experiment insuch representational leaps, was ultimately left unfinished, as Karl comes to rest amongthe infinite chorus of trumpeting angels at the Oklahoma theater, “the greatest theater inthe world.” Ultimately, speaking English—making the noise of the Engeln—is refiguredas a kind of sacred labor, the kind of linguistic patriotism that President TheodoreRoosevelt called for in the advent of World War I. “How fitting, that we will be togetheragain,” cheers Fanny as Karl decides to join the monolingual chorus. But she warns,“Don’t disturb the chorus, or they will fire me.” 60Karl is swept up into the mesmerizing unison of the noise, in which he begins todiscover precious subtleties. The (German) text trails off soon after his initiation intoEnglish monolingualism is figured as follows:60 Kafka 1992, 393. “Aber verdirb den Chor nicht, sonst entläßt man mich.”76

Karl began to blow; before he had thought it was only a roughly hewn trumpet, onlymade for making noise, but now it seemed to indeed be an instrument that couldperform every subtlety. 61Now fully fledged in English, Karl indeed becomes the Verschollene, the “lost one” wholeaves behind the text’s own language of composition, High German. It is thus significantthat the novel leaves Karl, perpetually, in the midst of his new monolingual labor in theangel-chorus, and remains unfinished.Volatile Cognates and Forlorn PronounsThough it is his first novel, The Missing Person is the last of Kafka’s texts to narrate a“happy” story of second-language use, where ambition and dedication propel a youngsecond-language adventurer toward his manifest linguistic destiny. From 1914 on, ananxious aporia reigns. From “A Country Doctor” to The Castle, Kafka’s protagonistsvacillate between an impulse to misrecognize multilinguality, and a vague knowledgethat it can only be evaded temporarily.Kafka’s multilingual critique often indicts words themselves as stealthy andunmanageable mercenaries, which take leave of their respective langues at will. In suchinstances he seeks to reveal a radical distance between presumed cognates. He remarks in1911 how:“Mutter” is for the Jew particularly German; unconsciously, it contains alongside itsChristian gleam a Christian coldness as well; when a Jewish woman is named“Mutter,” it sounds comical but also foreign. Mama would be a better name, if onedid not imagine “Mutter” behind it. I think that only memories of the ghetto61 Kafka 1992, 393. “Karl fing zu blasen an; er hatte gedacht, es sei eine grob gearbeitete Trompete, nurzum Lärmmachen bestimmt, aber nun zeigte es sich, daß es ein Instrument war, das fast jede Feinheitausführen konnte.”77

sustains the Jewish family, since even the word “Vater” is far from meaning theJewish father. 62The imagined, other space of the ghetto activates the irrevocable difference of meaningbetween “father” in German and its double in Yiddish.Kafka’s speech on the Jewish theater two years later echoes this concern for subtledifferentiation between translingual homonyms, for example between the German andYiddish renderings of “blood” and “death” respectively. Such deliberations on falsecognates serve as an indication of the cross-lingual strife operating behind each word inKafka’s “pure brook of language.” Consider for example this diary entry from 15 Dec.1910:Almost no word that I write fits with the others; I hear how the consonants rubaway from one another like tin and the vowels sing along like Negroes onexhibition. My doubts stand around in a circle in every word. 63The syntactic axis—how parts of speech are strung together to form a linear sentence—issubjected here to a figural estrangement. The words are social personae; the sentence is aspace in which to act those personae out. The passive narrator, who stands aroundlistening to the unruly behavior of these individual words, experiences syntactic relationsas fraught with animosity and repulsion. His words are display “Negroes,” coerced intoperforming and unable to assess their imminent fate.62 Kafka 1990, 102. “‘Mutter’ ist für den Juden besonders Deutsch, es enthält unbewußt neben demchristlichen Glanz auch christliche Kälte, die mit Mutter benannte jüdische Frau wird daher nicht nurkomisch sondern auch fremd. Mama wäre ein besserer Name, wenn man nur hinter ihm nicht “Mutter”sich vorstellte. Ich glaube, daß nur noch Erinnerungen an das Ghetto die jüdische Familie erhalten, dennauch das Wort Vater meint bei weitem den jüdischen Vater nicht.”63 Kafka 1990, 130. “Kein Wort fast, das ich schreibe, passt zum anderen, ich höre, wie die Konsonanteblechern auseinanderreiben, und die Vokale singen dazu wie Ausstellungsneger. Meine Zweifel stehenin jedem Wort im Kreis herum.”78

Despite Kafka’s elaborate declarations of mistrust for words, he does not assent to themodernist diagnosis of the fundamental ineptitude of language. On the contrary, hismistrust was rather a reverence for the animism and volatility of words, as he wrote toFelice on 18 February 1913:I am not of the opinion that one may ever lack the power to completely express thatwhich one intends to say or write. References to the frailty of languages andcomparisons between the finitude of words and the infinity of feeling are way offthe mark. In words, boundless feeling remains equally as boundless as it had been inthe heart. It was clear within, and it will be irrevocably so in words as well. This iswhy no one should have any worries about language—only worries aboutthemselves when words are gazing back at them. 64We will notice the astonishing difference in tone from the previous passage. WhereKafka had in the first instance elaborated the dystopic circumstances of writing—thecramped and cranky behavior of the writer’s words next to one another—the secondaccount speaks, with a quiet consolation, of words’ boundlessness and infinity. How arewe to account for this cleft in tone and conviction? Herein may lie a key to Kafka’s sensefor the conflict between monolingualism and multilinguality: whereas the firstarticulation concerns the (monolingual) scene of writing, the second concerns thehypotextual world of words in use, unbounded by the meta-formal constraints of writing.The potential of words from various languages to signify what is “in the heart” isradically attenuated when composing exclusively in a single language. These troubling64 Franz Kafka. Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit. Frankfurt am Main:Fischer, 1967. 305–6. “Ich bin nicht der Meinung, daß einem jemals die Kraft fehlen kann, das was mansagen oder schreiben will, auch vollkommen auszudrücken. Hinweise auf die Schwäche der Spracheund Vergleiche zwischen der Begrenztheit der Worte und der Unendlichkeit des Gefühls sind ganzverfehlt. Das unendliche Gefühl bleibt in den Worten genauso unendlich, wie es im Herzen war. Daswar im Innern klar, wird es unweigerlich auch in Worten. Deshalb muss man niemals um die SpracheSorge haben, aber in Anblick der Worte oft Sorge um sich selbst.”79

words that are “gazing back” at the writer are, perhaps, the Yiddish “blood,” which Kafkacannot reproduce in his German-language writing. They reside outside of his writerlyhabitus, but radically inside the repertoire of meanings to which he is accountable.Such stagings of words themselves as glowering menaces, forced laborers, or lazymelancholics recur often in the fictions and parables, as in a sketch from 1920. Entitled“He” [Er], this collection of aphorisms tells the story of the dysfunctional social life of apronoun, who is “never sufficiently prepared for any occasion.” An almost slapstickstraight-man figure, possibly modeled after Charlie Chaplin or other filmic clowns, “he”fails to get anywhere in life (i.e., antecedent reference, discourse, text), because “His ownforehead bone gets in his way; he hits himself on the forehead until it is bloody. 65 Theobstructive forehead of which “he” speaks is the upper right-hand serif of the letter “r” inthe German pronoun “er,” which inevitably rubs up against the hard surface of thesubsequent word. The anxious pronoun thus fails to establish any “relationships” oranaphoric nominal references—which is, after all, his job. Constantly caught off guard asnew words appear, the pronoun “he” can only generate a fraudulent reproduction ofpreexisting signs.Yet “he” refuses to accept culpability for his failures in referentiality (figured asunsociability), because he does not feel he is at fault for the infelicitous circumstances.On the contrary, “er” pleads indignantly to his employer, the reader: “If only one were65 Kafka 1990, 851. “Sein eigener Stirnknochen verlegt ihm den Weg, an seiner eigenen Stirn schlägt ersich die Stirn blutig.”80

able to prepare before the assignment arrived. That is, can one even succeed in a naturalassignment, one that isn’t just artificially put together? 66The burnt-out pronoun’s occupational malaise leads him to 1) dilettantism, 2) aninability to become historical, and 3) a tendency toward voluntary entropy and isolation:“The captive was actually free, he could take part in everything; he didn’t miss out onanything outside. He could have left the cage on his own. The bars of the cage weremeters apart from one another, so he wasn’t even really imprisoned. 67 (The faulty cage ofwhich he speaks is, perhaps, the “E” in “Er.”) In considering rebellion, this troubled partof-speechseems to propose a “general strike” of words, in which the means of reference,reproduction, and representation would come to a halt.“He” is particularly troubled by his inability to refer to foreign words. Apparentlyplaying on Martin Luther’s translation of Prophets 2:11, his limited range of genderedpronominal reference bars him from sunnier circumstances: “Some repudiate lamentationwith a reference to the sun; he repudiates the sun with reference to lamentation.” 68 Thesetwo gendered nouns “sun” and “lament”—the feminine Sonne and the masculineJammer—become objects of cross-lingual play. The German third-person masculinepronoun “he” can only refer to masculine lamentation and not the feminine noun sun. 6966 Kafka 1990, 848. “Könnte man sich denn vorbereiten, ehe man die Aufgabe kennt, das heißt, kann manüberhaupt eine natürliche, eine nicht nur künstlich zusammengestellte Aufgabe bestehen?”67 Kafka 1992, 849. “Der Gefangene war eigentlich frei, er konnte an allem teilnehmen, nichts entging ihmdraußen, selbst verlassen hätte er den Käfig können, die Gitterstangen standen ja meterweit auseinander,nicht einmal gefangen war er.”68 Kafka 1992, 851. “Manche leugnen den Jammer durch Hinweis auf die Sonne, er leugnet die Sonnedurch Hinweis auf den Jammer.”69 Die Bibel nach der Übersetzung Martin Luthers mit Apokryphen. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,1984. “Da ich aber ansah alle meine Werke, die meine Hand getan hatte, und Mühe, die ich gehabthatte, siehe, da war es alles eitel und Jammer und nichts mehr unter der Sonne.”81

Cramped and malcontent, the German workhorse pronoun longs for broaderresponsibilities than his langue allows.The word’s infinite predicament, its inability to relate or refer across certainthresholds, recalls Jacques Derrida’s reading of the parable “Before the Law”:What is delayed is not this or that experience, the access to some enjoyment or tosome supreme good, the possession or penetration of something or somebody.What is deferred forever till death is entry into the law itself, which is nothing otherthan that which dictates the delay. The law prohibits by interfering and deferring the"ference" [férance], the reference, the rapport, the relation. 70Here reference is that which is delayed—but what kind of reference? In the context of thecurrent analysis, the “man from the country” is discouraged, as Brod intimated above,from referencing in certain ways, from crossing over into the other sphere ofsignification, which—he learns too late—was meant for him. Like the pronoun “Er” whoresides in an open cage that he can leave at any moment, the man standing before the lawcan see the space, the light on the other side of the open door. On this side is thejurisdiction of unitary language, on the other side is the mix of languages. As DavidSuchoff notes about the priest who tells Josef the gatekeeper parable, “The funny thingabout the priest of High German Culture is that Kafka has made his punishing protectorof the purity of the Law a bilingual figure. […] Josef K. enters the “Cathedral” to hear theparable of the Law from a “priest”: but his language echoes the Hebrew and Aramaicaggadot, or legends, which Kafka loved, transmitted in Hebrew as well as Yiddish,sources that he knew.” 7170 Jacques Derrida. Acts of Literature. Trans. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. 205.71 Suchoff 2003, 253.82

Tampering with LanguageDespite these henolingual anxieties in Kafka’s narratives—the sense of another, absentlanguage nearby—they also tend to express an almost condemnatory apprehension aboutdabbling in foreign languages. Far from a good-faith effort to access meaningsunavailable in one’s own code, language acquisition was language burglary:The silent or spoken or self-torturous appropriation of foreign property, which onehad not acquired, but had stolen with a (relatively) fleeting grab, and which remainsforeign property, even if not one mistake can be proven, since everything here canbe proven by that quiet call of the conscience in a rueful hour. 72As a form of fraudulence and theft, speaking in another tongue without being initiatedinto its speech community enjoys none of the salutary political power to disorientnational chauvinism that Kafka had noted in the pre-War period. Though the narratorabove is stricken with regret upon using a language not his own, such contrition does notbefit the Jewish Mauschler, who is entitled, even destined, to rifle through the waxymonolingualism of middle-class German at will. Kafka comes to the defense ofMauscheln, the unruly Jewish dialect of High German that plagued the public image ofsuch writers as Karl Kraus, in the following terms:Mauscheln in itself is even beautiful, it is an organic link between paper German andgestural language [...] and a result of a tender sense for language, which has realizedthat, in German, only the dialects and the extremely personal High German are trulyalive, while the rest, the linguistic middle class, is nothing but ashes that can only be72 Malcolm Pasley, ed. Max Brod and Franz Kafka. Eine Freundschaft, Briefwechsel. Band II. Frankfurt amMain: Fischer, 1989. 359. “Die laute oder stillschweigende oder auch selbstquälerische Anmaßungeines fremden Besitzes, den man nicht erworben sondern durch einen (verhältnismäßig) flüchtigen Griffgestohlen hat und der fremder Besitz bleibt, auch wenn nicht der einzige Sprachfehler nachgewiesenwerden könnte, denn hier kann ja alles nachgewiesen werden durch den leisesten Anruf des Gewissensin einer reuigen Stunde.”83

ought artificially to life by Jewish hands rifling through them. That is a fact—comical or terrifying as you wish—but why does it attract the Jews so irresistibly? 73Here, excitable hands enliven a language which is not “their own.” Though still “foreignproperty,” the flat, eviscerated petit-bourgeois German language attracts the Jewishspeaker, who tampers with it and supplements it with gestural agitation.Naumann has noted how Kafka’s literary career coincided with the rise of anethnological discourse about the gestural semiotics of ritual. 74 Ritual had captured theattention of a tradition of anthropologists, culminating in Bronislaw Malinowski and his1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific. This gestural turn in ethnology provided anescape valve from the modernist crisis of language, opening up an ostensibly stablerefuge for “meaning” via paralinguistic behavior.Naumann notes an overlap between Kafka’s writing and ethnology’s departure fromproperly linguistic and philological argumentation in the early 20 th century. 75 Yet hisanalysis does not ask why Kafka’s recourse to gesture arises most prominently in crosslinguisticsituations, such as during his visit to his father’s Czech-speaking client citedabove. We might speculate that, just as the linguistically-handicapped ethnologist seeks asemiotic harbor in the gestural rituals of his subjects, Kafka’s protagonists turn to gesturewhen their knowledge of the spoken language encounters an impasse that they mustsurmount by paralinguistic means.73 Max Brod and Franz Kafka. Eine Freundschaft. Briefwechsel II. Ed. Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt amMain: Fischer, 1989. 359. “Mauscheln an sich ist sogar schön, es ist eine organische Verbindung vonPapierdeutsch und Gebärdensprache…und ein Ergebnis zarten Sprachgefühls, welches erkannt hat, daßim Deutschen nur die Dialekte und außer ihnen nur das allerpersönlichste Hochdeutsch wirklich lebt,während das übrige, der sprachliche Mittelstand, nichts als Asche ist, die zu einem Scheinleben nurdadurch gebracht werden kann, daß überlebendige Judenhände sie durchwühlen. Das ist eine Tatsache,lustig oder schrecklich, wie man will, aber warum lockt es die Juden so unwiderstehlich dorthin?”74 Scherpe 2006.75 Scherpe 2006, 43.84

A 1911 diary entry illustrates a fascination for how gesture complements anddisambiguates a language that is not Kafka’s own:This morning at Löwy and Winterberg’s. How the boss sits in his recliner with hisback sideways, in order to provide room and support for his Eastern Jewish handmovements. The interplay and mutual reinforcement of handplay and facialexpressions. Sometimes he conjoins the two, by looking at his hands or holdingthem close to his face for the comfort of the listener. Temple melodies in the toneof his speech, particularly when enumerating many points: he draws the melodyfrom finger to finger as if over so many pipe registers. 76We see in these descriptions an appreciation for how speakers illicitly tamper with adominant language—how they expropriate it through timbre, gesture, and tenderness.Figuring the other languageDeleuze and Guattari famously suggested that “minor literatures” revoke common-sensemetrics of distance and proximity, of insideness and outsideness in a given fictionalspace—be it “America,” “the castle square,” or “the revier of Count Westwest.” Theminor text achieves this “deterritorialization” by generating an intensive language thatdefies immediate recourse to sense and image. Instead of mapping out a retraceablelandscape of objects, signals of proximity to or distance from the narrator’s position inKafka call forth various language types. “[V]ernacular language is here, vehicularlanguage is everywhere, referential language is over there, mythic language is beyond.” 7776 Kafka 1990, 90–91. “Heute früh bei Löwy u. Winterberg. Wie sich der Chef mit dem Rücken seitlich inseinem Lehnstuhl stemmt, um Raum und Stütze für seine ostjüdischen Handbewegungen zubekommen. Das Zusammenspiel und gegenseitige Sichverstärken des Hände- und Mienenspiels.Manchmal verbindet er beides, indem er entweder seine Hände ansieht oder sie zur Bequemlichkeit desZuhörers nahe beim Gesicht hält. Tempelmelodien im Tonfall seiner Rede, besonders beim Aufzählenmehrerer Punkte führt er die Melodie von Finger zu Finger wie über verschiedene Register.”77 Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 23.85

It would follow that the figures traversing these domains are somehow cross-lingualagitators: the “Y”-shaped, marten-like animal living in the women’s section in “In OurSynagogue,” the screaming jackdaws of “An Old Document,” the loquacious Rotpeter of“Report to an Academy,” the singing mouse in “Josephine the Singer,” the man from thecountry in “Before the Law,” and the lungless, vagrant Odradek in “The Sorrows of aFamily Man.” Deleuze and Guattari describe these “metastable” figures as barring anyreaderly impulse to “interpret [Kafka’s] work by moving from the unknown back to theknown.” 78 These self-euphemizing creatures are agents from beyond the tinny, hunchedlanguage of the text in which they are to perform; they come bearing an inscrutable,barbaric gift.In both stories, “In our Synagogue” and “The Sorrows of a Family Man,” the narratorpuzzles on the (in)describability of a recalcitrant animal being—its improbable leapswithin a single enclosed space, its utterly tangential relationship to the prescribedfunctions of that space, which is nonetheless his irrevocable habitat. Like Odradek, theanimal in the synagogue—with its long neck and triangle-shaped face—maintains at leasttwo meters distance to any approaching human. Its coat is of an unidentifiable color,mixed with the dust and grout of the interior of the synagogue, resulting in a bright bluegreen.The story ends with rumors about how the custodian’s grandfather had oncehunted down an animal in the empty synagogue with a slingshot, rope, and stick. 79Were it not so often “flushed out” of its resting places, this animal would most likelybe a quiet, sedentary being. Though bound to the building in which it lives, its78 Deleuze and Guattari 1986, x.79 Franz Kafka. Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe: Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II. Apparatband.Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992. 336.86

unhappiness is attributable to the very fact that the building is a synagogue. It is alarmedby the sound of prayer, and no one can communicate effectively enough with it toprovide consolation. The men of the synagogue largely ignore it, while the women wouldbe unhappy if it were to disappear. The creature’s Y–shaped face and its habit oflingering in the women’s section of the synagogue, suggests that this creature is Yiddishspeech itself, its significations for which Hebrew and German are insufficient. Thenarrator wonders uneasily, “Might this old animal know more than the three generationsthat are assembled here in the synagogue?” 80As with Odradek, from “The Troubles of the Patriarch,” the survival or demise of thisuninvited yet domesticated, marten-like animal “in our synagogue” is almost a matter ofindifference. The dispassionate campaign of the temple elders to eliminate this animalrecalls Kafka’s 1911 diary reflections on forgetting Yiddish. He ruminates on a theaterpiece in which a rich Jew named Seidemann has poisoned his wife, because she hadrefused to be baptized twenty years before. “Since then he tried to forget the jargon,which sang along beneath his speech without his knowledge, and it expresses […] aparticular disgust for everything Jewish. 81 Yiddish asserts itself here, ineradicable andsubmerged, against the intent and will of the speaker.As in “In Our Synagogue,” a cross-linguistic gap arises between the spool-shaped,star-like creature Odradek and the patriarch who half grudgingly, half affectionatelyaccommodates him in the space of his house. This narrator is poised to define the creatureand to halt its reproduction at the same time. “He is asked: ‘What’s your name then?’80 Kafka 1992, 410. “Weiß dieses alte Tier vielleicht mehr als die drei Generationen, die jeweils in derSynagoge versammelt sind?”81 Kafka 1990, 61. “Seitdem hat er sich angestrengt, den Jargon zu vergessen, der freilich ohne Absicht inseiner Rede unten mitklingt, und äußert […] einen großen Ekel vor allem Jüdischen.”87

‘Odradek,’ he says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘Residence unspecified,’ he says andlaughs.” 82 Laconic and lungless, the inscrutable heirloom Odradek is said to exist only asan object of philological study. Though it is rumored to have originated in either Germanor Slavic, Odradek responds to questions of ancestry with a formula that one might havechecked off on the 1900 census of the Hapsburg Crownlands, where Yiddish was nottabulated as a language. As in Kaiser Joseph’s insistent interdiction against Yiddish,Odradek is the menace that makes it impossible for the patriarch to delineate between the“here” within the home territory and the “there” beyond. The patriarch laments: “Heresides variously in the attic, in the staircase, in the corridors. Sometimes he isn’t to beseen for months; he’s probably settled in other people’s houses, but he will certainlycome back to ours sometime.” 83 Odradek’s mobility alone—if not its passive contemptand negligible significance for the household—is enough to make the patriarch wish for itto disappear.A hostile indifference to the recalcitrant creatures’ survival resonates with the debatesamong Zionists and Bundists about the legitimacy of Yiddish as a Jewish language. In his1911 The Language of the Jews, [Die Sprachen der Juden], the German Zionist HeinrichLoewe wrote, “Hebrew is the language of the Jewish people, […] while the many latter[…] Jewish languages are results of the Galut [exile, !"#$]". They are products of82 Kafka 1994, 282–4. “Wie heißt du denn?’ fragt man ihn. ‘Odradek,’ sagt er. ‘Und wo wohnst du?’‘Unbestimmter Wohnsitz,’ sagt er und lacht.”83 Kafka 1994, 282–4. “Er hält sich abwechselnd auf dem Dachboden, im Treppenhaus, auf den Gängen, imFlur auf. Manchmal ist er monatelang nicht zu sehen; da ist er wohl in andere Häuser übersiedelt; dochkehrt er dann unweigerlich wieder in unser Haus zurück.”88

unfreedom and assimilation. […] The critical illness of our suffering people is howeverthe Galut. And we will only regain health through Hebrew.” 84Neither Odradek nor the synagogue pet is a properly metaphorical figure, preciselybecause they are not objects that could remain stable enough to stand in for another stablesignifier. Both figures are metastable; they can exist long-term in volatile forms, relyingon “the movement[s] of translation” that maintain a constant feedback loop betweenenunciation and statement, the act of speaking and the content of the utterance. 85 For itspart, Odradek is marked by a struggle between oral and written language, between socialand literary uses of Yiddish. Odradek seems to be a hub of fragmentary, yet heavily cited“threads” of text:It looks at first like a flat, star-like spool of thread, and indeed it seems to havethread spun upon it; but they must only be old, torn pieces of thread of the mostvarious kinds and colors, tied on to and snarled up within one another. 86Fractured but resilient, the tactical speech of Yiddish has been strung together on thisstar-shaped spool, a nomadic “body” of oral performance and emergent literature whichthe paterfamilias reluctantly plans to banish from the house.As the patriarch of Odradek’s adopted house says, “Of course no one would beinterested in such studies if there were not some being named Odradek.” 87 Nekula84 Heinrich Loewe. Die Sprachen der Juden. Cologne: Jüdischer Verlag. 1911. 145. “[Das Hebräische] istdie Sprache des freien Judenvolkes […], während die vielen späteren […] Judensprachen Erzeugnissedes Galut sind. Sie sind Produkte der Unfreiheit und der Assimilation. […] Die schwere Krankheitunseres leidenden Volkes aber ist eben das Galut. Und nur durch das Hebräische werden wir gesunden.”85 Deleuze and Guattari 1986, xii.86 Kafka 1994, 282–4. “Es sieht zunächst aus wie eine flache sternartige Zwirnspule, und tatsächlich scheintes auch mit Zwirn bezogen; allerdings dürften es nur abgerissene, alte, aneinander geknotete, aber auchineinander verfitzte Zwirnstücke von verschiedenster Art und Farbe sein.”87 Kafka 1994, 282–4. “Natürlich würde sich niemand mit solchen Studien beschäftigen, wenn es nichtwirklich ein Wesen gäbe, das Odradek heißt.”89

alternately suggests that Odradek may come from the Czech verb odrad-it, meaning todiscourage or alienate, adding that “ek” does not indicate a diminutive, but rather a suffixmeaning the “results of various processes.” 88 This suffix “ek”, however, cannot apply to aliving being in Czech. Nekula sees the fact that Kafka developed this word as a proof ofhis Czech knowledge, and as a reflection on his “discouraging, alienating” relationship toCzech.Always That Cry of the JackdawsThe Kafka family’s own linguistic alterity is figured almost as an anti-national menace inthe short story “An Old Document” (1917). In this text, a cobbler in the city square hasbecome resigned to the presence of northern nomads, who crowd the entrances to thealleys around the imperial castle and pose an increasing danger to the fatherland:One cannot speak with the nomads. They don’t know our language, they don’t evenseem to have one of their own. Among their own kind, they communicate with eachother like jackdaws. Over and over one hears that cry of the jackdaws. 89At first, the narrator-cobbler uses jackdaw [Dohle] as an ethnic simile, indicating whatthe nomads’ communication with one another sounds “like.” The next sentence seems,however, to abandon the simile and its explanatory valence altogether. This plaintive,confounded sentence, “Over and over one hears that cry of the jackdaws,” seems to markan exclamation independent of the sentence that precedes it. The parataxis of the pair ofsentences allows the scream of the jackdaws to hang in the air, with ambiguousprovenance. Is it only the nomads producing this paralinguistic sound after all? Or is a88 Nekula 2003, 15.89 Kafka 1994, 264. “Sprechen kann man mit den Nomaden nicht. Unsere Sprache kennen sie nicht, ja siehaben kaum eine eigene. Untereinander verständigen sie sich ähnlich wie Dohlen. Immer wieder hörtman diesen Schrei der Dohlen.”90

group of actual jackdaws intervening from elsewhere? The narrator does not, forexample, describe a perpetual recurrence of “the nomads and their jackdaw-likescreams,” but rather the screams of “the” jackdaws themselves. This apparentdisarticulation of the cry from the nomads to whom it was first attributed produces acurious gap.As Nekula notes, the Czech word for “Dohle” [jackdaw] is “Kafka,” 90 and theemblem over the door of Hermann Kafka’s store in Prague was a jackdaw, perched on aGerman oak branch. 91 The cobbler sees these “Kafkas” then—nomads from beyond theimperial city—as undermining the defense of the fatherland with their screams in thetown square. Barely in possession of a language that could be called their own, thenomadic Kafkas are so incommensurable with the institutions and customs of the city that“You can dislocate your jaw and pull your hands out of their joints, they still haven’tunderstood you and never will.” 92 In this resigned observation, the cobbler describes thefutility of gesture—not that of a single instance of gesturing, but of the entire category ofparalingual communication itself. The dislocated jaw and the hands wrested out of theirjoints epitomize a failure to gesture at all, a dismantling of communicative potential at itsembodied roots. “An Old Document,” perhaps a reference to the urban migration of hisgrandparent’s generation, is one of the most radical figurations of linguistic otherness inKafka’s fictional works, where the encrypted language repertoire of the writer’s ownfamily screams from the horizon.90 Nekula, 2003, 18.91 Iris Bruce. Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,2007.92 Kafka 1994, 265. “Du magst dir die Kiefer verrenken und die Hände aus den Gelenken winden, sie habendich doch nicht verstanden und werden dich nie verstehen.”91

The Fourth UnityIn Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida stages a punitive fantasy about thecolonial language of his youth. The narrator seeks to divest “pure French” of itsuniversalist pretentions, to anthropomorphize and localize the language into the figure ofa sentient subject, one who can and must exhibit shame, hunger and authentic emotion:The desire to make it arrive here, by making something happen to it, to thislanguage that has remained intact, always venerable and venerated, worshipped inthe prayer of its words and in the obligations that are contracted in it, by makingsomething happen to it, therefore, something so intimate that it would no longereven be in the position to protest without having to protest, by the same token,against its own emanation, so intimate that it cannot oppose it otherwise thanthrough hideous and shameful symptoms, something so intimate that it comes totake pleasure in it as in itself, at the time it loses itself by finding itself, by convertingitself to itself, as the One who turns on itself […] at the time when anincomprehensible guest, a new-comer without assignable origin, would make thesaid language come to him, forcing the language then to speak itself by itself, inanother way, in his language. 93Derrida’s narrator longs to force upon French a locus of embodiment, through which thelanguage might experience its own pleasures and frailties. Deleuze and Guattari seeKafka’s texts as interventions designed to shore up the poverties of nationalmonolingualism. In a rhapsodic tone not unlike that of Brod’s eulogy fifty years earlier,they insist:[Kafka] will tear out of Prague German all the qualities of underdevelopment that ithas tried to hide; he will make it cry with an extremely sober and rigorous cry. He93 Jacques Derrida. Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 51.92

will pull from it the barking of the dog, the cough of the ape, the bustling of thebeetle. 94Like Brod, Deleuze and Guattari praise Kafka’s steadfast commitment not “to artificiallyenrich this German, to swell it up through all the resources of symbolism, of onerism, ofesoteric sense, of a hidden signifier.” 95 Kafka’s linguistic operation is rather to go furtherinto deterritorialization, sobriety, and Prague German, toward an “arid” language that“vibrates with a new intensity.”Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of frontal attacks and violent ultimatums on nationallanguages—of demands for divestiture and accommodation—differ markedly fromKafka’s parables of monolingualism. Kafka’s leopards do not thrash or ravage the altarupon which the ritual is performed. Rather, because the ceremony at hand requiressacrifices not for material but rather for ritual ends, the community of believers is willingto tolerate the leopards’ intrusion. The leopards have become part of the ceremony—absent, yet always awaited.Collectively, Kafka’s parables of monolingualism pulse with signals of a linguisticlife outside the bureaucratic German of his professional life. The thresholds that threatenwith references from elsewhere—the closed kitchen door, the hatch in the console—arefissures in what might be called a fourth dramatic unity. Though Enlightenment drama,Romantic poetry, and the formal experiments of modernist literature have long since leftthe Averroen-Aristotelian unities of place, action, and time, Kafka’s texts indicate thatthe unity of national language, in its “crystal-clarity,” remains a hegemonic convention ineven the most avant-garde of literary fiction. It is arguably the constraint of this fourth94 Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 26.95 Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 19.93

unity of monolingualism to which Kafka’s philosophical fictions and aestheticinnovations are devoted.The most potent link between Franz Kafka and Primo Levi is not their Jewishness,nor the way that Kafka’s work seems to prefigure the inferno of Levi’s captivity. Whatmakes their writings resonate with one another is an omnipresent concern for the socialand semiotic tensions between monolingualism and multilinguality, between the clearlyrendered text and the world of inscrutable signs and utterances, a world that the textnonetheless aims to perform and emulate. The “fourth unity” that cramps and unravelsKafka’s texts—the unity of national literary language—is a principal concern in Levi’snarrative as well: How will the Holocaust be tellable in a unitary language, when it wascarried out by way an unprecedented chaos of language mixing?94

Chapter TwoLevi: There Occasionally Came a WordThere is perhaps no more strident contradiction of Max Brod’s praise for Kafka’s “purebrook of language” than that of one of his Italian translators. Primo Levi found kinship inthe gritty procedure of emulation and translation that brought Kafka’s literary language tothe page:Now, I love and admire Kafka because he writes in a way that is totally unavailableto me. In my writing, for good or evil, knowingly or not, I’ve always strived to passfrom the darkness into light, as […] a filtering pump might do, which sucks upturbid water and expels it decanted: possibly sterile. Kafka forges his path in theopposite direction: he endlessly unravels the hallucinations that he draws fromincredibly profound layers, and he never filters them. The reader feels them swarmwith germs and spores: they are gravid with burning significances, but he neverreceives any help in tearing through the veil or circumventing it to go and see whatit conceals. 1Though Levi defines his writing practice pejoratively as that of sterile filtration, and notthe pursuit and arranging of gravid, burning significations, what unites the two authors inLevi’s mind is how they are both disposed, indeed compelled, to harvest meanings from aconcealed elsewhere and make them plain for others to read. As a translator of Kafka bychoice and a translator of Birkenau by necessity, Levi writes with an abiding concern forthe conative function of language, that is, the ability to arouse response and action from1 Luciano Gaeta. “Così ho rivissuto Il processo di Kafka.” La Stampa [Torino] 9 Apr. 1983.95

the reader. 2 Yet his prose upholds and honors the degree to which concentration campexperiences must remain untranslatable into any single language.If Kafka’s language parables—“Before the Law” and “Returning Home” forinstance—ruminate on the inadmissible and animous multilingualism just beyond thethreshold of the text, Levi’s text teach about an analogous instance of unsayability: theentropic, heteroglot language situation of the Nazi concentration camp, the vanishing“native language” of extreme privation in the KZ [Konzentrationslager]. Irreproduciblein any other space, the practices of linguistic survival that Levi both undertook anddetested overwhelm the capacities of monolingual representation in literary prose. Hewrites:A hundred yards away is Block 23; written on it is “Schonungsblock.” Who knowswhat it means? […] I have stopped trying to understand for a long time now. As faras I am concerned, I am by now so tired of standing on my wounded foot, stilluntended, so hungry and frozen, that nothing can interest me anymore. 3For Levi, writing “from darkness into light” meant at least four things: 1) translating intocomprehensible, monolingual narrative an event or routine that took place in and amid anunprecedented mix of national, pidgin, and specialized languages, 2) carrying a set ofmeanings from one hidden, unwitnessed space into public view, 3) resisting the impulseto retroactively decipher that which remained menacingly undecipherable in the narratedspace, e.g., the word Schonungsblock above, and 4) continuing to write when thephenomenon about which one is writing is resignation, disengagement, automaticity. This2 Among his six functions of language, Roman Jakobson describes the “conative function” as the endeavorto effect response from one’s interlocutor. Roman Jakobson. “Closing Statements: Linguistics andPoetics.” Style in Language. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. 350-377.3 Primo Levi. If this is a Man and The Truce. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus, 1987. 54.96

passage emblematizes each of these four situations. The inscrutable signifierSchonungsblock is far off from the narrator, both physically and affectively. He cannotaccess it across the translingual threshold of the camp field; nor does it exist in thesemiotic repertoire of the world outside the camp.Levi learned this turbid, unfiltered, and regimental camp language system as a meansfor survival, despite knowing that it would be functionally useless if he were to survive.In Julia Kristeva’s words, camp language remained within him “like a secret vault—or ahandicapped child—cherished and useless—that language of the past that withers withoutever leaving you.” 4Not only was the camp a radically other linguistic space, incommensurable with andunprecedented in Western Europe’s national territories, the language hegemony of theThird Reich also radically altered the German language at home and abroad, as itpropagated the new German as a global language of intercultural and commercialexchange. Between 1930 and 1946, German had itself become a foreign-sounding,“barbaric” language, as lexical cleansing and accelerated recourse to neologism wrestedGerman from its own native speakers and promoted the new language of the Third Reichthroughout southern and southeastern Europe. This new German language was designedto be comprehensible to native speakers and usable by all. Meanwhile, the unprecedentedconcentration of mutually incomprehensible languages in the KZ-space was both theresult and design of occupation, forced deportation, and the geopolitical reorganization ofEurope throughout the 1930s. The paradox of Nazi rule in Europe was that it generated as4 Julia Kristeva. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press,1992. 15.97

many new forms of social hybridity—linguistic, national, cultural—as it aimed toproduce forms of social purity.In the first section of this chapter, I sketch how the German language itself wasaltered and proliferated over the fifteen-year rise and reign of the Third Reich in Europe.I then turn to the KZ space as the site of a radical collision of monolingualism andmultilinguality and claim that this collision is a primary cause for what has come to beknown as the “incomprehensible” in Holocaust historiography. In the wake of emergingresearch on the “language situation” in the concentration camp, I explore texts that signalthe multiple-language milieus of camp life, which—irreproducible for uninitiatedoutsiders—was cleansed and transcribed during reconstruction to fit the monolingualnorms of post-War national reconstitution. I turn to Primo Levi’s writings in The Trucefor indices of this multiple-language hypotext, the irreproducible “other space” oflinguistic estrangement that the Third Reich and its concentration-camp systemengineered.Speaking the Language of the Third ReichI only have one language; it is not mine.—Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other 5In his linguistic memoir LTI: Notebook of a Philologer, Viktor Klemperer insists thateven if he had published all of his diary entries from the years 1930–1945, includingthose that did not explicitly thematize language, he would still have given the text thesame linguistically inflected title, Lingua Tertii Imperii:5 Derrida 1998, 1.98

Its strongest effects were not exercised through individual speeches, nor througharticles or flyers, posters or flags. It did not realize itself through anything that oneneeded to internalize with conscious thought or conscious feeling. Rather, Nazismglided into the flesh and blood of the masses through the individual words, turns ofphrase, and sentence structures that it foisted upon them through millionfoldrepetition until they were mechanically and unconsciously taken on. 6For Klemperer, the world of the Third Reich—its objects, habitus, institutions, andimagery—seemed to be nothing so much as a rapidly changing semiotic code, alwayssuddenly accruing and discarding layers of meaning according to the needs of theregime. 7 For Klemperer, this language of the Third Reich—the lingua tertii imperii—wasnot a parole (kind of utterance) but a langue (linguistic system), an inescapable sharedcode whose structural patterns and lexical tendencies transcended individual ideology,interest, and resistance:I heard the workers speaking while sweeping the streets or in the machine room: itwas always—in print or in speech, among the educated and the uneducated—thesame cliché and the same vocal timbre. And even among those who were the mostgrievously persecuted victims and thus necessarily the mortal enemy of NationalSocialism, even among Jews—in their conversations and letters, and even in theirbooks, as long as they were still allowed to publish them—what prevailed was the6 Viktor Klemperer. LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen. Leipzig: Reclam, 1978. 21. “Die stärkste Wirkungwurde nicht durch Einzelreden ausgeübt, auch nicht durch Artikel oder Flugblätter, durch Plakate oderFahnen, sie wurde durch nichts erzielt, was man mit bewußtem Denken oder bewußtem Fühlen in sichaufnehmen mußte. Sondern der Nazismus glitt in Fleisch und Blut der Menge über durch dieEinzelworte, die Redewendungen, die Satzformen, die er ihr in millionenfachen Wiederholungenaufzwang und die mechanisch und unbewußt übernommen wurden…. Sprache dichtet und denkt nichtnur für mich, sie lenkt auch mein Gefühl, sie steuert mein ganzes seelisches Wesen, jeselbstverständlicher, je unbewußter ich mich ihr überlasse.”7 Klemperer 1978, 16. “Ich habe beim Straßenkehren und im Maschinensaal die Arbeiter sprechen hören: eswar immer, gedruckt und gesprochen, bei Gebildeten und Ungebildeten, dasselbe Klischee und dieselbeTonart. Und sogar bei denen, die die schlimmst verfolgten Opfer und mit Notwendigkeit die Todfeindedes Nationalsozialismus waren, sogar bei den Juden herrschte überall, in ihren Gesprächen und Briefen,auch in ihren Büchern, solange sie noch publizieren durften, ebenso almächtig wie armselig, und geradedurch ihre Armut allmächtig, die LTI.”99

LTI: just as all-powerful as it was impoverished, and all-powerful precisely becauseof its impoverishment. 8A multilingual scholar of Romance philologies, Klemperer was nonetheless takenhostage by the hegemonic monolingualism of his time, a monolingualism that did notbelong to him, and one which changed shape week to week.Klemperer cites the rise of the acronym—HJ, BDM, GL, NSDAP—as a linguisticstrategy within Nazi language, indicating that even native German speakers generallyneeded to avail themselves of these “makeshift mnemonics” to stay abreast of the newlanguage. Through his ironic, invented signum, LTI, Klemperer transmogrifies themnemonic, inculcatory role of the acronym into a tactic of self-defense. By repeating“LTI, LTI!” under his breath, he was able to affix a name and a modus operandi to theceaseless innovations of Nazi semiosis. 9 Klemperer’s critical neologism—one that wouldhave no transferable meaning outside of the Nazi regime—acted as a “balancing rod”with which to protect his “inner freedom.”In Klemperer’s account we hear traces of Kafka’s attempt to come to terms with adominant code that was “nothing but ashes,” yet which held an irrevocable mandate overhis livelihood. 10 The irony is that Klemperer chooses to cut his concept LTI from aforeign cloth—medieval Latin—submerging within it the grand Nazi neologism “ThirdEmpire” and its love for acronyms. He imagines his LTI as:A well-inculcated signum, just like one of those well-toned foreign expressions thatthe Third Reich loves from time to time: Garant sounds more meaningful than Bürge8 Klemperer 1978, 26.9 Klemperer 1978, 15–16.10 Deleuze and Guattari 1986.100

und diffamieren more imposing than schlechtmachen. (Perhaps not everyone understandsit, and it has a particularly strong effect on those who do not. 11With LTI, Klemperer ironically calls forth an “endemic resource” from the Nazilexicon—that is, its helpless affection for “Roman grandeur” despite the recentcodification of Indo-Germanic purism.Intercultural Communication in Hitler’s New EuropeThe linguistic practices Klemperer describes as the lingua tertii imperii did not arise,fully formed, in March 1933. They were built upon a decades-old initiative of“intellectual imperialism” that would promote German language and culture throughoutthe world. The 1910s had heralded a new era of strategic planning across national bordersthat far surpassed the ad hoc diplomatic ventures with which 19 th century Europeannobility had traditionally been entrusted. Many prominent industrial speculators inGermany came to believe that the increasing traffic among once distant sectors of theglobal economy would render conventional warfare superfluous. In an era whengeographic, communicative, and war-tactical distances were perceived as shrinking,“foreign cultural politics” [Auswärtige Kulturpolitik] emerged as a profitable andpractical alternative to territorial and military “power politics” in the pursuit of globaldominance.Cultural theorists such as Karl Lamprecht, Kurt Riezler, and Max Weber all exploredthe potential benefits of an “imperialism of the idea.” In his 1914 article “On ForeignCultural Politics” in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Lamprecht described this distinctive new11 Klemperer 1978, 15. “Ein schön gelehrtes Signum, wie ja das Dritte Reich von Zeit zu Zeit denvolltönenden Fremdausdruck liebte: Garant klingt bedeutsamer als Bürge und diffamieren imposanterals schlechtmachen. (Vielleicht versteht es auch nicht jeder, und auf den wirkt es erst recht.)”101

endeavor as follows: “A foreign cultural politics that is to be accompanied by long-termsuccess may not approach foreign cultures, which are the object of its activities, with itsown requirements only. Many people have already made this discovery, and have thuscomplemented economic expansion with a little system of cultural gifts [Gaben], forexample schools and hospitals. What they expected was that such gifts wouldautomatically reinforce economic influence, in that it would lead to a certain cognitivedependence among the recipient nations upon their benefactors.” Lamprecht takes theoccasion of his essay to point out that this rationale has proven only partially successful.Citing the Roman saying beneficia non obtruduntur [benefits do not lead to obligation],he claims that foreign cultural politics must “go one step further.” In order to secure“cognitive dependence” throughout the world, financial and infrastructural aid abroadmust be buttressed by educational, linguistic, and scientific systems, which will truly“win the hearts” of foreign nations around the world.After the 1918 defeat, Germans across the political spectrum became aware of thepersecution that ethnic Germans outside of the Reich’s borders had experienced duringwar-time. The idea of “foreign cultural politics” after the Great War thus satisfied twosymbiotic cultural desiderata: to support ethnic German communities throughoutEurope’s eastern regions and beyond while developing potential trade and culturalexchange partners in those areas. 12 This dual logic enhanced the appeal of an aggressiveforeign cultural politics across the political spectrum of the early Weimar Republic.Cosmopolitan Social Democrats, academic pacifists, and monarchist Pan-Germans12 Eckard Michels. Von der Deutschen Akademie zum Goethe-Institut: Sprach- und auswärtigeKulturpolitik 1923–1960. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005. 22.102

[Alldeutsche] alike strategized to deliberately proliferate German culture and languagearound the globe. In contrast to the territorial empires of France and Great Britain,politicians and intellectuals in Germany tended to view this “peaceful imperialism” as thede facto cultural logic of the new Europe, the “intellectual weapon” [geistige Waffe] thatwould accomplish what conventional warfare had heretofore done, or failed to do, forGermany.The most credible model for a culturally oriented foreign politics, however, wasGermany’s recent opponent, France. In 1923, the former Bavarian Ambassador to Paris,Baron von Ritter, began to openly discuss his idea to establish a German Academy[Deutsche Akademie] to mirror the French Academy [Academie Française]. This neworganization would promote German science and language around the world; it would becomprised of a Research Department at home, and, abroad, a Practical Department,charged with German language instruction globally. Representatives of the fledglingDeutsche Akademie, or DA, stressed that their foreign cultural politics must not devolveinto a “mechanical, artificial propaganda.” Franz Thierfelder, its President during theearly 1930s, declared that “Our practical division must only undertake to make way forscientific research, German literature, art, and music, to dismantle stereotypes, to makeadvancements through promotion and provocation.” 13 The modes and media ofdissemination were to include lectures, books and press, schools, clubs, medical andreligious missions, music and theater, graphic arts and crafts, industry and technology,and courses on German business. The goal, as the Director of the Main Branch of the DAdeclared in 1929, was that “Germany must endeavor, just as France has done with such13 Michels 2005, 22.103

great success, to have in every country a class of learned people, who attest to whatGermany has given them to the end of their lives, and—convinced of the worth of thispossession— communicate it to others.”The idea of a French-German symbiosis became commonplace early on in Weimarintellectual spheres, as German writers longed for the lush aesthetics of French belleslettres.In his book The Mask and the Face of France [Die Maske und das GesichtFrankreichs] Otto Grautoff, a translator of Romain Roland, lauded the potential marriageof “the will to shape, that constant demand for staticity in the Latin culture and thealways-flowing, always forward and deeper-pushing, the always becoming, thedynamism of Germanness.” 14 Throughout the 1930s, the German Foreign Affairs Bureaubegan to reach out to French youth movements and promoted “self-critical” Frenchwriters such as Montherlant, Céline, Brasillach, and Drieu La Rochelle in order tomobilize the French public against the static “gerarchy” of the ruling French government.SpracharbeitThe first President of the DA’s newly formed Practical Division was Karl Haushofer, aprofessor at the University of Munich and mentor of Hitler’s representative in the NaziParty, Rudolf Hess. In 1923, Haushofer began lecturing on his concept of “geopolitics”[Geopolitik], which held that non-military and non-territorial means should be preferredin maintaining control of political regions beyond German borders. His concept of livingspace[Lebensraum] was not precisely a territorial principle, but a cultural one, based on14 Otto Grautoff. Die Maske und das Gesicht Frankreichs in Denken, Kunst und Dichtung. Stuttgart:Perthes, 1923. 77. “Der Gestaltungswille, das dauernde Verlangen nach Statik in der lateinischen Kulturund das ewig Fließende, immer vorwärts und tiefer Drängende, das dauernd Werdende, dasDynamische des Germanentums.”104

the notion of facilitating receptiveness toward Germanness abroad. By 1926, the morenationalistic supporters of the DA, such as Karl Christian von Loesch, suggested thatjournalists from southeastern Europe could be influenced most effectively if the DA wereto offer more language courses throughout the Balkans and southern Europe.As this focus on German-language teaching increased, program directors and fundersat the DA strategized to saturate untapped landscapes in the European foreign languagemarket. This was fundamentally a struggle against the French influence in these regions.Since France had long held a monopoly on second language learning in eastern andsouthern European capitals, the Deutsche Akademie began to establish language schoolsin the provincial cities and countryside. Until the late 1930s, the DA’s expansion plansfocused on cities where less French “linguistic competition” existed and whereinhabitants were demonstrably motivated—for economic, cultural, or political reasons—to learn German. 15 This practice allowed the DA to champion the rural ethnic Germancommunities who had suffered persecution during and after World War I, whilesimultaneously laying claim to the linguistic devotion of villagers and townspeoplethroughout the European countryside. 16 Though DA administrators consideredYugoslavia to be the key to cultural predominance throughout the Balkans, Frenchenjoyed a firm foothold as the obligatory first foreign language at Yugoslavianuniversities. Bulgaria, on the other hand, remained relatively uncommitted in its secondlanguagepolicies, and therefore the DA planners opened more language schools[Lektorate] in Sofia and other provincial Bulgarian cities.15 Michels 2005, 90.16 Michels 2005, 111.105

Promoting the German language internationally grew in political urgency throughoutthe 1930s. Between 1933 and 1940, the notion that German could become Europe’sprimary language of commerce and communication quickly transformed itself from achimerical improbability to an administrative necessity. By 1932, as the DA began toaccrue significant financial power, Franz Thierfelder advised his program coordinatorsthat they should “methodically, step by step, wrestle through the regions for intellectualinfluence, in which the general developments of an openness for German cultural workhas been established.” 17Spracharbeit im Ausland, or language work abroad, enjoyed a peculiar independencefrom the National Socialist government during this period. In exchange, the NationalSocialist government enjoyed the benefits of an international German language-teachingapparatus that was not perceived as a deputy institution of the new Hitler regime, whichhad consolidated most other social and cultural organizations in 1933. The Nazigovernment resisted the temptation to streamline the DA and DAAD into its otherdomestic cultural conglomerates. In spring of 1935, the Foreign Bureau [AuswärtigesAmt] rejected a plan to consolidate all of the foreign relations and language teachingorganizations into one umbrella apparatus called “German Cultural Exchange.” 18 Equallynoteworthy is the fact that the Deutsche Akademie teaching staff underwent no majorpersonnel changes between 1933 and 1938. 19 In contrast to other cultural spheres—visualart, domestic higher education, elementary education, youth groups—language teachersabroad were allowed remarkably free reign in their curricular choices. In a letter to Karl17 Michels 2005, 101.18 Michels 2005, 108.19 Michels 2005, 113.106

Haushofer in 1933, Franz Thierfelder foresaw the prudence of maintaining anindependent language-teaching profession around the world during the politicaltransformations afoot in Germany: “We can only successfully continue and strengthenour cultural promotion work abroad, if the scholarly cloak of our organization does notbecome threadbare.” 20By the late 1930’s, language program coordinators at the Foreign Bureau wereassessing the results of five years of National Socialist governance on German culturalpolicy abroad. Foreign language education planners began to foresee new dilemmas forthe future linguistic management of Europe. Wilhelm Burmeister, Director of the DAADin 1937, expressed concern about what he perceived as Germany’s radical culturalisolation—even from such allied states as Italy. According to Burmeister, thispredicament of inter-ethnic understanding [zwischenvölkisches Verständnis] could beremedied by a more sensitive approach to teaching the language and culture of the NewGermany.A Lingua GermanaThierfelder’s 1938 treatise Germany as a World Language [Deutsch als Weltsprache] isconscious that sober intercultural diplomacy must take the place of the halcyonexpansionism of early National Socialist cultural policy. He stressed that Nazi languagepolicy must assist foreigners in overcoming the difficulties endemic in the Germanlanguage itself—such as the inconsistencies in its “two-script” system. 21 The rapid20 .Michels 2005, 108.21 Franz Thierfelder. Deutsch als Weltsprache. Berlin: Verlag für Volkstum, Wehr und Wirtschaft, 1938.47.107

changes in the living language of German since the end of the 19 th century have made itincreasingly difficult even for “America-Germans” to understand the language of the“New Germany.” In charting a course for a foreigner-friendly language policy,Thierfelder steers clear of both utilitarianism and philological purism; for him, impurityis the price that German must pay to become a language of global importance [Kaufpreisfür Weltgeltung].If German was to become a language of “use between peoples” [zwischenvölkischerGebrauchs], Nazi language policy could not afford to purify German of French and Latininfluences. Thierfelder opposed a general policy outlawing “foreign words” in theGerman language. It would have been a grave mistake, for instance, to create a Germanmedical vocabulary to replace the existing physiological lexicon of Latinate derivation.Organizations interested in a revivification of the German language, he contended, shouldconcentrate on removing lifeless ornamentation and “paper-bound style,” rather thanferreting out foreign words. which had earned the “rights of the guest” [Gastrecht] andoffer much-needed assistance to second language learners.Nor could German language teachers abroad afford to exact perfection from theirlearners. 22 Thierfelder reasoned that since teaching German abroad had become a matterof “public service” in the National Socialist age, the DAAD must employ only the most“humane” pedagogues, regardless of their academic credentials. By this, he meant topromote the hiring of instructors who would gladly stray from the philological andgrammatical dreariness of the lesson plan to build inroads into the “heart” of the22 Thierfelder 1938, 52.108

foreigner. 23 The National Socialist language teacher was entirely capable of overcomingthese intercultural problems, because “Germans are most capable and prepared tounderstand the foreign nation in its innermost being and to recognize its special value.” 24Gaining access to the hearts of his foreign students required that the teacher know thepolitical relationships between the German people and the host country. The teacher mustresist the temptation to remain isolated in the monolingual company of his Germancontemporaries. He or she must learn the language of his guest country, regardless of itsranking or currency among world languages, if only out of a commitment to “humanduty.” Since “the personal, internal gain achieved from the learning of any language isbeyond doubt,” the Nazi teacher can return to Germany with “a piece of the world,”ensure that Germany will not become isolated, and lay the groundwork for the expansionof the German Empire. 25For Thierfelder, if these cosmopolitan provisions for a global German wereconsistently embodied, the German language teacher would ultimately succeed in histask. Nonetheless, “The imperial German language teacher [ReichsdeutscherSprachlehrer] would step into the circle of his pupils often as the first representative ofhis people, and from the outset he is greeted with an implacable and uninterruptedcritique.” Some foreign students, claims Thierfelder, would be disappointed if theirGerman teacher were not blond. It is thus the first responsibility of the language teacherto recognize that his students will not be able to differentiate between the medievalGerman, the Wilhelmine German, the Republican German, and the National Socialist23 Thierfelder 1938, 59.24 Thierfelder 1938, 59.25 Thierfelder 1938, 60.109

German. The teacher must therefore be “a son of his time” [Sohn seiner Zeit],demonstrating to his pupils the commonalities between the National Socialist andGermans of bygone ages, and when necessary, making his “otherness” [Anderssein]understood. 26 Since the prejudices of peoples towards one another are stronger than amere logical or factual refutation could counter, the language teacher must be a livingcounter-example to the vices ascribed to Germans over the ages: self-righteousness,heavy drinking, a predilection for physical altercations and sentimentality, lack of grace,tactlessness, and brutality. Yet Thierfelder was certain that “in general, the openness tothe German essence will overcome any deep-seated rejection.” 27 The work ofcounteracting these stereotypes among foreign learners, he claimed, required that theGerman teacher demonstrate good taste, physical fitness, and cleanliness in themaintenance of his person, home and effects.Thierfelder insisted that the German language must not shy away from expressingthose qualities—masculinity, complexity, and organicity—that allow it to “stride forthrespectably, like a German.” The intractable shapelessness of the German sentence isdeceptive; it veils a strict yet supple capacity to imitate the actual “process of livingspeech” [lebendigen Sprechvorgangs], while English and French remain stranded at thelevel of “abstract thought process” [abstrakten Denkvorgangs]. 28 Teaching these lifeaffirmingfeatures of the German language, even though they present consistent difficultyto second-language learners—setting the bar high, he reasons—will prepare the foreignlanguage student for the great challenge of countenancing the German Volk.26 Thierfelder 1938, 58.27 Thierfelder 1938, 58.28 Thierfelder 1938, 54.110

Soon after the conquest of Paris, the German Romanist Friedrich Sieburg expressedhis hopes for the future of France in the 1941 preface to his best-selling 1929 book Godin France [Gott in Frankreich]: “The defeat goes beyond France itself and affects ideasand forms of life that are woven into every human being. More than ever, it is worththinking about the fate of France. Will it renew itself and find its place in the emergingorder, or will it take on no formative role in the future of our continent?” 29In his dissertation on National Socialist foreign policy in 1941, the Hamburg-basedphilosopher Roland Adolphi praises the French for their self-representational savvy:One might be of the opinion that, for the reputation of a people, it is sufficient forit to have culture and to let it shine upon foreign lands; an organized, plannedcommunication with other peoples is superfluous and even aggravating from thisperspective. Yet the French have come the closest to realizing that this is not thecase and have been among the earliest to apprehend the following: in French, it issaid “Even God has a need for his bell to be rung,” and he needs to be manifestlytransmitted in cultural affairs. Just as one must open one’s mouth in order to speakthe truth, it is not enough in the life of the peoples that one have culture. One mustmake others talk about oneself, one must show his culture. 30Speaking in the AftermathThus far, I have attempted to show how the German language itself was transformed overthe course of Nazi rule—in lexicon and idiom, in its transnational reach, and in its short-29 Friedrich Sieburg. Gott in Frankreich? Frankfurt am Main: Societäts Verlag, 1929. 15. Karl Epting.Frankreich im Widerspruch. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1943.30Roland Adolphi. Grundlegung für eine kritische Darstellugen der deutschen auswärtigen Kulturpolitik inden Jahren 1919–1933. Hamburg: Hamburg Philosophische Fakultät, 1941. “Man könnte meinen, fürdas Ansehen eines Volkes genügt es, Kultur zu haben und diese aus sich selbst auch aufs Auslandausstrahlen zu lassen, ihre organisierte, planmäßige Vermittlung an andere Völker sei überflüssig, sogarstörend. Dass dem nicht so ist haben (…) die Franzosen am besten und jedenfalls am frühsten begriffen.Französisch hat das Wort “Dieu lui-meme a besoin, qu’on sonne les cloches” und seine übertrageneAnwendung auf dem Gebiet des Kulturellen. Und wie man auch der Wahrheit den Mund öffnen muß,so genügt es im Völkerleben nicht, daß man Kultur hat,—man muß auch von sich reden machen, manmuß seine Kultur zeigen.”111

lived yet indelible significance as the harbinger of a globalizing imperial power. By 1945,it could be said that all of Europe had become multilingual, subject to the“monolingualism of the other” of Nazi occupation. Klemperer remembers, just before theDresden bombings in 1945, a friend named Waldmann, who had been a fur salesman“before.” Upon learning that Mussolini has been toppled, Waldmann greets his friendStühler at the latter’s door, saying:“Is it allowed for me to enter?” he called. “Since when are you so polite?” came theanswer from within. And Waldmann responded immediately. “It’s coming to anend, so I have to become accustomed again to the conversational tone with mycustomers, and I’m starting right now with you.” He was speaking in completeseriousness, he certainly had not intention to joke; his heart longed for the old socialstatus of his language. 31Stühler is taken off-guard by the high-toned politeness of his friend. Without hesitating,Waldmann explains that “It is almost over, you see, and so I have to become reaccustomedto the tone of negotiating with customers, since I will begin chatting withthem again soon.Interesting here is Stühler’s objection to his friend’s precipitous shift in register back topre-1935 conversational conventions, which betrays a discomfort with the prospect of areturn to the hierarchical linguistic relations that had conditioned the friends’ relationshipbefore Nazi rule. The shared circumstances among Dresden’s beleaguered Jewishsurvivors had obscured the distinctions of social class and status that had previously31 Klemperer 1978, 195. “‘Ist es gestattet einzutreten?’ rief er. ‘Seit wann bist du denn so höflich?’ kam vondrinnen die Antwort. Und Waldmann erwiderte sofort: ‘Es geht ja nun zu Ende, da muß ich michwieder an den Umgangston mit meinen Kunden gewöhnen und fange gleich bei Ihnen an.’ Er sprachvöllig ernst, er harte gewiß nicht die Absicht zu scherzen; in der Hoffnung seines Herzens verlangte esihn nach der alten Sozialschicht seiner Sprache zurück.”112

existed between them. Klemperer continues: “LTI knows no private sphere distinct froma public one, nor a written language distinct from a spoken one—everything is talk, andeverything is public.” 32What emerges most powerfully from his descriptions is the success with whichlinguistic specificity was expropriated from its speakers and delivered back to them inaltered form—through everyday artifacts, interpellations, clichés, and signage. Newwords and phrases came from an elsewhere beyond the self, yet they could not quite beconsidered foreign. Such processes of alienation established a precarious political splitbetween a speaker and his/her “own language” under Nazi rule—what might beconsidered, in reference to Derrida’s formulation above, a monolingualism of the Other.In what language, then, was a narrative of witness to be possible?Assimilated Recollections, Translingual ManuscriptsAs the first KZ-memoirs went to press in 1946, overwhelmingly under the financialauspices of the four Allied administrations in Germany, the new genre of “camptestimony” quickly took on a programmatic shape. Already in 1948, Hannah Arendt hadtaken a public stance against the predominance of a new, standard-bearing genre of camptestimonial she called “assimilated recollections.” For Arendt, this narrative mode wasevident in recently published texts like Eugen Kogon’s The SS-State [Der SS-Staat] andDavid Rousset’s The Concentrationary Universe [L’univers concentrationaire]—memoirs that, in Arendt’s words, “inspire those passions of outrage and sympathy32 Klemperer 1978, 29. “Die LTI kennt sowenig ein privates Gebiet im Unterschied vom öffentlichen, wiesie geschriebene und gesprochene Sprache unterscheidet—alles ist Rede, und alles ist Öffentlichkeit.”113

through which men have always been mobilized for justice.” 33 She claims that the goalsof this urgently informative genre threatened to draw attention away from testimoniesthat might lack the urge to disambiguate—texts that, through their commitment toretaining and reenacting the experience of the KZ’s indecipherability, may leave thereader “cold, apathetic, and baffled.” 34In contrast to “assimilated recollections,” Arendt suggests that there is another, lessprominent genre of testimony thatrecords but do[es] not communicate things that evade human understanding […]There are numerous such reports by survivors; only a few have been published,partly because, quite understandably, the world wants to hear no more of thesethings, but also because they leave the reader cold. […] We attempt to expresselements in present or recollected experience that simply surpass our powers ofunderstanding. We attempt to classify as criminal a thing which, as we all feel, nosuch category was ever intended to cover. 35Arendt’s early critique, penned while many former Nazi captives like Levi were stillliving in Displaced Persons camps, presaged a debate that would frame the next halfcenturyof Holocaust Studies. Who may testify to what? How may one testify, and inwhat sort of national and/or context-specific languages? Though not specifying themultilingual composition of Nazi concentration camps, of the inevitability of beingroutinely confronted with language one does not understand, her judgment begs preciselythis angle of analysis.Instead, the conative testimonial—with its key values of comprehensibility andcomprehensivity—was quickly becoming the hallmark of authentic representations of33 Hannah Arendt. “The Concentration Camps.” Partisan Review 15.7 (1948). 743.34 Arendt 1948, 743.35 Arendt 1948, 743.114

camp life. By decoding the otherworldly signifiers of the KZ space for the post-Warreader who had never beheld the likes of a concentration camp, Rousset and Kogonoffered a sociological, informative foundation upon which to reckon, research, anddebate. Giving access to “what the camps meant” required that these author-witnesses laytheir words unequivocally bare—including the symbols, technical terms, andorganizational principles that constituted a day in a given KZ. These assimilatedrecollections, according to Arendt, retroactively deciphered the macrocosm and observedit (in the spatial sense of “attending from above”), a luxury that no inmate everexperienced.Witnessing the UnpublishableRaised in the golden decades of national philology, the midcentury generation ofEuropean editors and publishers reading these manuscripts had never encountered suchan intractably translingual narrated space as the concentration camp. Oschlies notes howpost-War Polish press editors “sat helpless over manuscripts of former inmates,” cuttingsections that failed to meet industry-standard lexicon, tone and relevancy criteria. 36Potential publishers were mesmerized by camp signifiers, and yet unable to manage theirvariability and unassignable provenance. Despite the KZ system’s Babelic design,assimilated testimony—in a broadly accessible and translatable language—became theurgent key not only with which to communicate experiences of camp life, but with whichto refashion a European future that might resemble its pre-Nazi past.36 Wolf Oschlies. “’Lagerszpracha’: Soziolinguistische Bemerkungen zu1 KZ-Sprachkonventionen.”Muttersprache 96 (1986): 98–109.115

Jagoda et al. note that most camp memoirs written in camp languages [lagerzspracha]remain unpublished, while those that have been published were first cleansed of the“pathological jargon” that facilitated social exchange in the camps and catalyzed theiradministrative apparatus. 37 Still other publishers, notes Jagoda, tended to Germanize thecamp lexicon after the fact, effacing the hybrid provenance of Auschwitz-Birkenauparole. 38 Despite the painstaking archival work of his research team in today’s Polishcommunity of Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Oschlies pleaded as late as 1985 that “We arestanding somewhat helplessly at the beginning of a new systematic research project”about adverse multilinguality in the Holocaust. 39In the spirit of eliminating the linguistic gap between concentrationaires and theirimplied readership, it was common for early post-War survivors, sociologists, and theireditors to add glossaries to their accounts for the sake of clarification. Publishersencouraged memoirists to provide a list of common camp terms, which would helpreaders reconstruct an authentic feeling of a given camp’s milieu.The terms that received the most frequent glossing in early Auschwitz survivormemoirs, according to Jagoda et al., were:cugang / aufnama (entrance / intake)efekty (personal effects)Micenab (Hats off!)prominencja lagrowa (The most privileged classes of camp inmates, the “campprominence”)37 Zenon Jagoda et al. “Selbsthilfe und Volksmedizin im Konzentrationslager.” Die Auschwitz-Hefte.Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1987. 241.38 Jagoda 1987. Oschlies 1985.39 Oschlies 1986.116

indy (armbands denoting the penal class, and thus social standing, of a givenprisoner)biksy (“Büchse,” food vessels made of preserve cans that held coffee and soup)bazaar (market where commodity exchange took place between prisoners) 40Taking, as an example, the word blokführerztuba [Block Leader’s Room], spoken inPolish inflection and declension, Jagoda et al. note how it had no potential synonym inthe Polish or German language. Wartownia, though it denotes “watchpost,” would lacknecessary denotative power for the camp milieu. It would not mean “the place in whichthe fate of prisoners is decided.” 41 Birkenau lagerzspracha combined Polonized Germanwords, non-Polonized German words, Polish and German vulgarizations and brutalisms,Polish neologisms, dialectal variations, military German words, and abbreviations in bothlanguages. 42 Oschlies’ study highlights how early narratives foregrounded the grotesquesymbolic reinscription of words like Musulmann, millionaire, translator, organize, andstring concert to mean—respectively—speechless inmate near death, inmate with aseven digit identification tattoo, bludgeon, steal, and beating. 43The camp language of Auschwitz also differed vastly from the camp languages ofRavensbrück and Mauthausen, which were heavily informed by the Spanish of the CivilWar period. In the case of each camp language, the lexicon changed according to thestaggered influx of dominant first languages in the respective camp. The sharp increase inthe deportation of Hungarians in 1942–43, for example, shifted the lexical fundaments ofAuschwitz camp language away from Polish. The daunting empirical and ecological40 Jagoda 1987, 24341 Jagoda 1987, 242.42 Jagoda 1987, 242.43 Oschlies 1986.117

variability of camp-language all but precluded researchers from undertaking any morethan a tentative inventory of the “language situation” in the camps. 44Lagerzspracha GlossariesIn immediate post-War accounts, the explanation of selected terms became a specialmode of authentication, seeking to provide relief for the uninitiated reader. Yet eventhese glossaries often came with telling caveats. David Rousset prefaces the “Attempt at aGlossary” [Essai de glossaire] from his 1946 The Days of our Death [Les Jours de notremort] with the following:To transcribe according to phonetic principles would not have presented any sensefor the majority of readers. We have tried here in the most appropriate way toreproduce, according to sonority, but the accent, the tone, the gesture of ourRussian companions are inimitable…. I must add that the translation is quite oftentoned down. 45Rousset’s pressing nota bene calls the reader’s attention to the untranslatable rhetoricalexcess of each of the camp-specific words he presents; without the proper sensorycircumstances, the tonal and gestural setting of the words, the reader has access only to apale imitation of the language.Marsalek’s testimony from the Mauthausen camp also contains a glossary, which heintroduces in the following terms: “The incomplete collection of camp expressions listedhere in alphabetical order attests to the perverse brutality of the circumstances and the44 Oschlies 1986.45 David Rouset. Les jours de notre mort. Paris: Editions de Pavois, 1947. 770. “Transcrire selon lesprincipes phonétiques n’aurait présenté aucun sens pour la plupart des lecteurs. On s’est efforcé ici, dela façon plus approchée, de reproduire selon la sonorité, mais l’accent, le ton, la mimique de noscompagnons russes sont inimitables…. Je dois ajouter que la traduction est bien souvent adoucie.”118

“devilish” linguistic confusion among speakers from all over Europe. 46 This linguisticcompendium, which Marsalek characterizes as incomplete, nonetheless seeks toforensically reorder the “incorrigible confusion of languages.”Others, including Floris Bakels, chose to embed this glossing technique into theirnarrative:The beatings have become independent of purpose, an issue on its own. Asystematic exercise for its own sake. The human element—one man murderinganother—has been lost. The muscle-machine smashes flesh, makes mincemeat outof it. […] When the muscle-machine runs out of fuel, it stops. Slowly it takes humanshape again. That of a murderer. The Nazis call it fertigmachen. 47As an alternative heuristic strategy to the glossaries of Marsalek or Rousset, Bakel’slyrical manner of laying bear the term fertigmachen builds backwards from thedescription into its context-specific term.In his short, incisive bibliographical survey, Taterka notes that—though fifty years ofHolocaust literature has produced a burgeoning corpus of technical reference works oncamp-specific jargon—there has been a dearth of research on the “language situation”[Sprachsituation] in KZ’s and Nazi-ruled ghettos. As Taterka, Ochlies, and Aschenbergnote, glossaries and lexical primers on camp jargon only obliquely addressed theexperience of language use that shaped camp life. 48 In order to record the linguistic and46 Hans Marsalek. Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen. Dokumentation. Vienna:Lagergemeinschaft Mauthausen, 1974. 275. “Die unvollständige Sammlung der hier in alphabetischerReihenfolge aufscheinenden Lagerausdrücke bezeugt die perverse Brutalität der Verhältnisse und dasheillose Sprachenwirrwar der aus ganz Europa stammenden Gefangenen.”47 Floris Bakels. Nacht und Nebel. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979. 117.48 Thomas Taterka. “Zur Sprachsituation im deutschen Konzentrationslager.” Juni. Magazin für Literatur &Politik 21 (1995): 37–54. Heidi Aschenberg. “Sprachterror. Kommunikation im nationalsozialistischenKonzentrationslager.“ Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 118.4 (2002): 529-572.119

ethical other-worldliness of the concentration camp, another kind of narrative would benecessary .Levi and the UnsayableAn extended passage from Primo Levi’s The Truce dramatizes—at the level of thesentence—the tension between assimilated recollection, untranslatability, and linguisticsurvival in concentration camp memoir:Hurbinek was a nothing, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked aboutthree years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and had no name;that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of thewomen who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds thatthe baby let out now and again. He was paralyzed from the waist down, withatrophied legs, as thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face,flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatterthe tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered toteach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stareboth savage and human, even mature, a judgment, which none of us could support,so heavy was it with force and anguish. […] After a week, Henek announcedseriously, but without a shadow of selfconsciousness, that Hurbinek “could say aword.” What word? He did not know: a difficult word, not Hungarian: somethinglike “mass-klo”, “matisklo.” 49Levi’s three-year-old fellow inmate—called Hurbinek in the absence of any givenname—died a few weeks after saying the word: mass-klo / matiskli. Born and socializedin Auschwitz, the child appeared to have no native language among the scores ofinterwoven codes and pidgins that channeled and dispersed meaning in the concentration49 Levi 1987, 198. Levi 1963, 27–29. Translation modified. “Hurbinek era un nulla, un figlio della morte,un figlio di Auschwitz. Dimonstrava tre anni circa, nessuno sapeva niente di lui, non sapeva parlare enon aveva nome: quel curioso nome, Hurbinek, gli era stato assegnato da noi […] Dopo una settimana,Henek annunciò con serietà ma senza ombra di presunzione, che Hurbinek “diceva una parola”. Qualeparola? Non sapeva, una parola difficile, non ungherese: qualcosa come ‘mass-klo’, ‘matiskli’.”120

camp space from 1933 to 1946. Hurbinek’s enunciation occurs in an unrecoverable otherlanguagethat belongs only to the camp. The referential terrain of his language was notthe national territories from which his various fellow inmates had once come, but thetranslingual camp space itself. Hurbinek’s emergent speech was a creolizing pidgin,nourished by the extreme repertoire of signs available in the concentrationary universe ofBirkenau. Levi continues:During the night we listened carefully: it was true, from Hurbinek’s corner thereoccasionally came a sound, a word. It was not, admittedly, always exactly the sameword, but it was certainly an articulated word; or better, several slightly differentarticulated words, experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps on aname. Hurbinek continued in his stubborn experiments for as long as he lived. Inthe following days everybody listened to him in silence, anxious to understand, andamong us there were speakers of all the languages of Europe; but Hurbinek’s wordremained secret. No, it was certainly not a message, it was not a revelation, perhapsit was his name, if it had ever fallen to his lot to be given a name, perhaps (accordingto one of our hypotheses) it meant “to eat,” or “bread,” or perhaps “meat” inBohemian, as one of us who knew this language maintained. 50According to Levi’s account in The Truce, Hurbinek was three years old at the time of hisdeath in mid-1945. In these first moments following the fall of Hitler’s New Europe, Leviand his blockmates listened to Hurbinek’s speech with an almost forensic attention. Asrepresentatives of Europe’s national languages, they listened closely to this “nativespeaker” of Auschwitz’ camp language. On the one hand, they listened for traces of a50 Levi 1987, 198. Levi 1963, 27–29. “Nella notte tendemmo l’orecchio: era vero dall’angolo di Hurbinekveniva ogni tanto un suono, una parola. Non semper esattamente la stessa, per verità, ma era certamenteuna parola articolata; o meglio, parole articolate legermente diverse, variazioni sperimentali attorno a untema, a una radice, forse a un nome. / Hurbinek continuò finché ebbe vita nei suoi esperimenti ostinati.Nei giorni seguenti, tutti lo ascoltavamo in silenzio, ansiosi di capire, e c’erano fra noi paratori di tuttele lingue d’Europa, ma la parola di Hurbinek rimase segreta. No, non era certo un mesaggio, non unarivelazione; forse era il suo nome, se pure ne aveva avuto uno in sorte, forse (secondo una delle nostreipotesi) voleva dire “mangiare”, o “pane”; o forse “carne” in boemo, como sosteneva con buoniargomenti uno di noi, che conosceva questa lingua. “121

comprehensible national language—whether Bohemian, Hungarian, or otherwise. Yetthey were also awaiting an act of transcendent meaning-making from Hurbinek thatmight bring “crematorium Esperanto” itself into circulation and relevance. 51 Theirexpectation is flouted on both counts; Hurbinek ultimately has no decipherable messageto reveal to his interlocutors.“Nothing remains of him,” writes Levi, “He bears witness through these words ofmine.” 52 Hurbinek’s non-revelation, his frail native pidgin language opens a mise enabyme in Levi’s text that haunts Holocaust narrative. Though it has been standard inHolocaust historiography to understand unrepresentability and speechlessness as an indexof the ethically incomprehensible in the Holocaust, 53 Hurbinek’s dilemma ofenunciation—and that of his blockmates—was an urgently linguistic one. What is mostmenacing for all participants (including us as readers) is not just the underlying factum ofwhat is to be said or written, but also the entropic code of camp language in which thatsignified is indefinitely sequestered. To cite Arendt’s distinction above, Levi records theutterances that Hurbinek produces without communicating them. The prose moves aboutlaterally, guessing at the meaning, producing asyndetons of possible yet improbablematches for the sound the child is repeating in his corner. The prose thus emulates, on thelevel of sentence syntax, the process of waiting and divining a signifier that willnonetheless always remain concealed.51 Tadzeuz Borowski. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Trans. Barbara Vedder. New York:Penguin, 1976.52 Levi 1987, 198.53Susan Gubar. Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2003. Elrud Ibsch. Die Shoah erzählt: Zeugnis und Experiment in der Literatur.Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2004.122

Birkenau’s Native SpeakersLevi calls attention to a generation of young native speakers of camp language as it beganto develop from a pidgin into a creole.Hurbinek was not the only child. There were others, in relatively good health; theyhad formed a little ‘club’, very closed and reserved, in which the intrusion of adultswas visibly unwelcome. They were wild and judicious little animals, who conversedin languages I could not understand. The most authoritative member of the clan wasno more than five years old. 54Since Levi was well aware of how Hungarian, Greek, Moravian, and Catalan sounded,when he writes of “languages I could not understand,” he is talking about new pidginlanguages, hybridized during the long-term confinement of people speaking scores ofdialects and codes in the compressed space of Auschwitz III (Buna-Monowitz). Levi’sdescription of the IG-Farbenindustrie chemical plants begins to suggest how thelinguistically incomprehensible and the ethically incomprehensible were mutuallyconstitutive in camp life:The Buna is as large as a city; besides the managers and German technicians, fortythousand foreigners work there, and fifteen to twenty languages are spoken. All theforeigners live in different Lagers which surround the Buna […] The CarbideTower, which rises in the middle of Buna and whose top is rarely visible in the fog,was built by us. Its bricks were called ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, matinal, teglak,and they were cemented by hate, hate and discord, like the Tower of Babel, and it isthis that we call it; Babelturm, Babelturm; and in it we hate the insane dream ofgrandeur of our masters. 55Again, Levi’s lyricism emulates the multilingual means of production at work in Buna,the process of building brick-by-brick, cognate-by-cognate, the Babel tower. Designed54 Levi 1987, 200.55 Levi, 1987, 78–79.123

around linguistic hierarchies and regulated through cross-lingual incomprehensibility, theBuna work camp tortured and mortified with language itself. Being an inmate meant theinability to decode, and yet the (impossible) necessity to apprehend and reproduce rapidlyvariant and binding linguistic repertoires. Richard Glazar’s tableau from Treblinkaaccentuates the KZ’s extreme multilingualism:Somehow [the foreman] makes whatever language he is speaking sound likeGerman. There are many words I don’t understand, and I fill in with what I assumehe wants to say. He is standing above me on the gigantic mountain of clothing fromwhich the others are pulling, yanking, tugging, running in and running out. I look upat him, up there spreading his arms wide, the whip dangling from his wrist. 56Power is in the hands, not of a monolingual German SS officer, but of a multilingualdesignee, himself a prisoner, speaking a language that may or may not be German. Thenarrator is unsure, even indifferent, to the actual provenance of the language. Inmates aremeanwhile stripped bare of the signs and symbols that had bound them to the worldoutside. Levi writes:They have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak they will notlisten to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away ourname; and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to doso, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were,still remains. 57Silence and Semiotic AwarenessRobert Antelme articulated the distinction between camp life and life outside in thefollowing terms: “In the camps, the “silence” of the detainee is not the silence of one who56 Richard Glazar. Trap with a Green Fence. Trans. Roslyn Theobald. Evanston, Ill: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1995. 7.57 Levi 1987, 33.124

should not speak, but of one who cannot speak.” 58 This inability to speak was, of course,of multiple provenances. Hunger, illness, delirium, and cold drove inmates to become soemptied out of affective engagement with the external world that many never spokeexcept when responding to an order. Yet this “silence” for Antelme was also theexperience of being unable to respond in the proper code, of not being able to use thecontext-specific lexicon and idiom as it abruptly evolved in a given camp system.Administrative routines of call-and-response speech drove voluntary, expressivespeech to the margin of social life. The subject was drawn into a compulsory procedureof decoding even the most fleeting, paralingual signs. In addition to the variously coloredtriangles sewn into uniforms, some deputized inmates from the camp’s “prominent” classwore silk armbands of various decorative colors and patterns denoting what scarcecommodities they currently had on hand for bartering purposes. 59 The tattoo system alsoresulted in an intricate mode of social literacy:Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000; there are only afew hundred left and they represented the few survivals from the Polish ghettos.One does well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000;they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, sotake care they don’t pull the wool over your eyes. 60As Levi, Glazar, and others assert, decoding distant semiotic and sensory data in spite ofone’s immobility and noncomprehension was a primary activity for inmates. Floris58 Robert Antelme. L'espèce humaine. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. 201. “Dans les camps, le “silence” du detenun’est pas le silence de celui qui ne doit pas parler, mais de celui qui ne peut pas parler.”59 Hermann Langbein. People in Auschwitz. Trans. Harry Zohn. Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 2004.60 Levi 1987, 34.125

Bakels describes his acute attunement to semio-spatial dispersion in his memoir Nightand Fog [Nacht und Nebel]:One acquires an astonishing heightening of the senses…Man’s brain canaccommodate a certain quantity of impressions. A vacuum develops. This cannot befilled with new stimuli, so one’s awareness of what already exists is heightened. At 9am you smell what is being prepared in the kitchen, 200 meters away. 61Inmates had to anticipate meaning, guess meaning, and reproduce unknown meaningregularly, often while unable to shift perspective or inspect the source-data in the midst ofthe other physically devastating tasks.Monolingual inmates with only minimal access to or knowledge of German andYiddish were far less likely to survive the first few weeks of imprisonment. It is thereforea gruesome, structural precondition of the corpus of camp memoirs we read today thatmost surviving witnesses were multilingual. At the time of their arrest and deportation,most surviving memoirists already possessed, or were able to quickly achieve, an aboveaveragecache of multilingual capital. Though all KZ-inmates were de facto situationalmultilinguals—compelled to life-and-death procedures of deciphering beyond their nativelanguage—only those in possession of a certain permutation of multilingual proficiency(often including Yiddish or German) tended to survive long enough to bear witness. Thestark immediacy of language hierarchies haunts Levi’s writing precisely because it didnot represent an “obvious transgression” on the part of the individual prisoner:You review your memories. … No, you find no obvious transgressions, you did notusurp anyone’s place, you did not beat anyone (but would you have had the strengthto do so?), you did not accept positions (but none were offered to you …), you didnot steal anyone’s bread; nevertheless you cannot exclude it. It is no more than a61 Bakels 1979, 43.126

suspicion, indeed the shadow of a suspicion: that each man is his brother’s Cain,that each one of us (and this time I say “us” in a much vaster, indeed, universalsense) has usurped his neighbour’s place and lives in his stead. 62A gruesome corollary of this principle existed in some inmates’ overidentification withcamp language as an adopted dominant code. Levi tells the story of a certain 12-year-oldnon-German Kapo protégé at Auschwitz, who had so voraciously adopted the languageof the enemy that he reproduced it in his sleep after liberation.He shouted imperious commands in German at a troop of non-existent slaves. “Getup, swine, understand? Make your beds, quickly; clean your shoes. All in line, liceinspection, feet inspection! Show your feet, scum! Dirty again, you shit heap! Watchout, I’m not joking. If I catch you once more, it’s the crematorium for you!” Then,yelling in the manner of German soldiers: “Fall in! Dressed! Covered! Collar down;in step, keep time! Hands in line with the seams of your trousers! 63The boy’s ability to produce and mimic German commands had ensured his survival untilthe dissolution of the Nazi regime. Many non-Yiddish-speaking monolinguals did notsurvive even to enter the symbolic life of the camp; often they did not even know wherethey were before dying. This begins to explain the predominance of bilinguals andmultilinguals among the authors of camp literature. The silences in the Holocaust canon,where accounts by monolinguals would have been, made a language-based history of theHolocaust all the more recalcitrant.This asymmetry both begs a reconception of Holocaust memoir from the perspectiveof multilingual survival and undermines Giorgio Agamben’s assertion that the camp was“the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power62 Primo Levi. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Summit Books, 1988.81–82.63 Levi 1987, 202.127

confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation.” 64 Mediating between power andpure life was an intricately structured economy, an emergent market of mutuallyincomprehensible languages spoken simultaneously, and in close quarters. Understoodalong the lines of Erving Goffman’s notion of situation as a “set of mutual monitoringpossibilities,” 65 camp space was a landscape of linguistic capacities and incapacities, ofspeech and speechlessness—a hyperbolic language market that regulated subsistenceaccording to who could understand and operate within the vernacular code of themoment.Thresholds of ReinitiationDespite the centrality of multilingual and creole competence in daily survival, the pidginsand mixed languages of the KZ became the object of social and scholarly stigmatizationafter 1945. One of the most incisive and data-rich studies of “crematorium Esperanto” todate characterizes lagerzspracha as being “imbued with the inhuman situation [of thecamp] and saturated with brutalisms, inhumane curses and expletives. One can perceivethis degenerate lagerzspracha […] as a language-pathological phenomenon that is alreadyfading into history, for there are not many former camp inmates who continue to use it intheir intimate circles.” 66 As pathological and barbaric, the lexicon of witness wassubjected to cleansing. The translation practices that made possible the publication ofearly camp testimonies were to a great extent homologous with other rituals of first-64 Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998. 170–171.65 For Goffman, a social situation is “any environment of mutual monitoring possibilities that lasts duringthe time two or more individuals find themselves in one another’s immediate physical presence, andextends over the entire territory within which this mutual monitoring is possible.” Irving Goffman.Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine, 1967. 167.66 Jagoda 1981, 241.128

encounter between concentrationaires and their liberators. Levi describes his experienceof being bathed by two Russian teenagers at the Auschwitz Displaced-Personsencampment after liberation as a kind of translation rite—benevolent, yet antiseptic:I am not questioning that a bath was opportune for us in our condition: in fact itwas necessary, and not unwelcome. But in that bath, and at each of those threememorable christenings, it was easy to perceive behind the concrete and liberalaspect a great symbolic shadow, the unconscious desire of the new authorities, whoabsorbed us in turn within their own sphere, to strip us of the vestiges of ourformer life, to make of us new men consistent with their own models, to imposetheir brand upon us. 67The successive national christenings—first by Polish, then Russian, then Americanhands—that reintroduced the narrator’s body into life outside would also recur in theredaction and editorial preparation of camp memoirs. In order to transition from camplifeback to the world of the living, ex-inmates needed to be cleansed in body and then inlanguage. That re-socializing inmates’ use of language to the status quo ante effectivelyobscured the linguistic changes and specificities they experienced over the years in agiven camp was an unobjectionable matter of course.The task of ensuring comprehensibility for readers who never experienced“concentrationary language” was thus entrusted to the pre-war national languages.Whether written in broken military German, lagerzspracha, or a mix of languages,pidgins, and dialects, testimony needed to be shepherded out of the translingual matrix ofits production. Through an unprecedented total mobilization of translation across the67 Levi 1987, 194. “Non intendo gia mettere in dubbio che un Bagno, per noi in quelle condizioni, fosseopportune; era anzi necessario, e non sgradito. Ma in esso, ed in ciascuno di quei tre memorabililavracri, era agevole ravvisare, dietro all’aspetto concreto e letterale, una grande ombra simbolica, ilDesiderio inconsapevole, da parte della nuova autorità che volta a volta ci assorbiva nella sua sfera, dispogliarci delle vestigia della nostra vita di prima di fare di noi degli uomini nuovi, conformi ai loromodelli, di imporci il oro marchio.”129

continent, the translingual sublime of fascism’s camp spaces was gradually disentangledto befit the monolingual orders of post-War national reconstruction. 68Translating the Speech of the AnnulledAll manner of immediate post-war encounters with the ex-inmate—the translingualdetainee who no longer quite belonged to any respective national community—weremarked not only by linguistic estrangement, but other forms of mutual repulsion as well.Levi remembers his first post-liberation encounter with Russian soldiers as follows:They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only bycompassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyesto the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drownedus after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage:the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at anotherman’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should havebeen introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will forgood should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defense. 69Levi himself describes a yearning for national re-homogenization among his comrades,amid the chaos of mass post-War repatriation:In those days and in those parts, soon after the front had passed by, a high wind wasblowing over the face of the earth; the world around us seemed to have returned toprimeval Chaos, and was swarming with scalene, defective, abnormal humanspecimens; each of them bestirred himself, with blind or deliberate movements, inanxious search of his own place, of his own sphere, as the particles of the fourelements are described as doing in the verse-cosmogonies of the Ancients. 7068 Here, I suggest amending James Chiampi’s principle of the “concentrationary sublime” (based in Croce’saesthetics) to include the specifically linguistic features of camp life. See James T. Chiampi. “Testifyingto his Text: Primo Levi and the Concentrationary Sublime.” Romantic Review 92.4 (2001): 491–511.69 Levi 1987, 188.70 Levi 1987, 208.130

Levi here describes the tension between a longing for home, for one’s “own sphere” as itpre-existed Nazi deportation, and a need to document the other “own sphere” of theconcentration camp in its untranslated, irreconcilable, radically other form. This tensionbetween “assimilated recollection” and the subjugated languages of camp lifeunderscores the dilemma memoirists faced.Remembering his first return to Germany after liberation, Levi attests to his ownintense need to tell his story to the Germans and elicit their response:We felt we had something to say, enormous things to say, to every single German,and we felt that every German should have something to say to us; we felt an urgentneed to settle our accounts, to ask, explain and comment, like chess players at theend of a game. 71Yet Levi’s own enunciative position often mirrors the annulled speech of Hurbinek—theaspiring yet indecipherable child-speaker of Auschwitz. Once, upon meeting a group ofPoles during the months of his post-War transport through Eastern Europe, he asks alawyer to translate “his story” to them. Levi describes his request for language assistancein the following way:I had a torrent of urgent things to tell the civilized world: my things, but everyone’s,things of blood, things which (it seemed to me) ought to shake every conscience toits very foundation. The lawyer translated into Polish for the public. Now I do notknow Polish, but I know how one says ‘Jew’ and how one says ‘political’; and I soonrealized that the translation of my account, although sympathetic, was not faithful toit. The lawyer described me to the public not as an Italian Jew, but as an Italianpolitical prisoner. […] I asked him why, amazed and almost offended. He replied,embarrassed: “C’est mieux pour vous. La guerre n’est pas finie.” 7271 Levi 1987, 176.72 Levi 1987, 226–7. “It’s better for you. The war is not over.” The lawyer addresses Levi in the secondpersonformal.131

Convinced of the universal import of his account, the narrator watches the lawyerdeliberately mistranslate for his own safety. Here we may note a relation among 1)Hurbinek’s inarticulate, non-revelatory enunciations among his blockmates at Auschwitz,2) the Polish-speaking lawyer’s precautionary (and yet paternalist) mistranslation of thenarrator’s account, and 3) Levi’s literary intervention itself. Each of these threeenunciative moments represents an impossible imperative to “shatter the tomb ofdumbness.”The Only MeansPrimo Levi’s narrative practices foreground a set of symbolic circumstances in camp lifethat resist translatability and monolingual representation: the enforced silence of crosslanguageexchange, the emergence of strictly camp-specific codes among long-termprisoners, the annihilation of given names and interpersonal distinction, and theunprecedented multilingualism of the camp. It is on this basis that many witnesses insistthat camp-language is the only means to “overcome the distance” between life outsideand the concentrationary universe.Oschlies cites the testimony of a fifty-year-old Czech doctor Frantisek Blaha at theNuremberg tribunals in 1946, who declared:In the interests of this trial, I am prepared to give my testimony in German for thefollowing reasons. 1. I have lived exclusively in a German environment for the lastseven years. 2. A series of particular topical expressions, that arose within andaround the concentration camp, are exclusively German inventions, and one canfind no equivalent in other languages. 7373 Oschlies 1985.132

Accounts from Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen and other camps indeeddemonstrate an imperative to defend camp language against the cleansing practices ofpublishers and translators. For Devoto,This language, which includes terms used formally and informally by the Nazis andother terms used by the deportees, is the only means (or so it appears to us) topenetrate into the interior of the camps and avoid being kept out, as would happenif we based our research solely on historical sources and statistical data. It alsorepresents the only instrument with which to overcome the psychological distancethat separates us from the nightmarish dimension called the “Lager.” 74According to this account, camp language not only recognizes and reenacts theexperience of an inimitable symbolic situation, it represents the primary condition for theiterability of this experience at all. One Polish-speaking inmate, Maria Slisz-Oyrzyiska,attested to this fact in more personal terms:Among us former women captives, we use camp language. We cannot exchangememories in another language. Often we lack the fitting expressions for denotingtypes of work or events. But when we share memories in our lagerzspracha, we seeeverything as it really was. 75Even Levi, the eloquent dramatist of cross-lingual aporia, narrates an instance in whichhis native Italian is insufficient for communicating a story about his life in Birkenau.Daydreaming about being back in Italy, the narrator imagines the intranslatability of whathe witnessed first hand as follows:74 Heidi Aschenberg. “Il faut que je parle au nom des chose qui sont arrivés… Zur Übertragung vonKonnotation und Aposiopese in Texten zu Lager und Shoah.” Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache 24(1998): 137–158. Trans. Graziano Paolicelli. “Questo linguaggio—che va dai termini usatiufficialmente e ufficiosamente dai nazisti, fino a quelli adoperati dai deportati—e l’unico mezzo (cosialmeno ci sembra) per penetrare ail’interno del campi e non rimanare invitabilmente fuori, comoaccadrebbe basandoci unicamente sulli fonti storiche e statistiche. E anche l’unico mezzo per superarela “distanza” psicologica che ci separa da quell mondo d’incubo che fu il ‘Lager.’”75 Jagoda 1976, 47.133

I would lie down on the ground to kiss the earth, as you read in books, with my facein the grass. And a woman would pass, and she would ask me “Who are you?” inItalian, and I would tell her my story in Italian and she would understand, and shewould give me food and shelter. And she would not believe the things I tell her, andI would show her the number on my arm, and then she would believe. 76Imagining being back in Italy and recounting his experiences, his native Italian languagedoesn’t suffice to verify the experience. Levi needs the tattooed number to certify thestory, to make it communicable. The verification, inscribed on his body, is of anothercode that is not his own; the entire story could never be told in Italian alone. The numberon his arm, an indelible element of the camp’s living “traffic in meaning,” supersedes thenarrative potential of his own language.The sign of the tattooed number is the threshold, indexing a story that cannot be toldin a national language. Here we may recall Levi’s role as spokesperson for theuntranslatable Hurbinekwho had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world ofmen, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whosetiny forearm—even his—bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the firstdays of March 1945, free but not redeemed. .7776 Levi 1987, 49–50.77 Levi 1987, 198.134

Discipline and BarbarismAs you have not invited a German this year, butme instead, that must have something to do withthe fact that you don’t consider me a stranger, aforeigner. And without a doubt, you are rightsomehow. 78—Jorge Semprún, Speech at the German Bundestag, 2003The ethno-national mythos upon which Nazi domination was constructed—itsbloodthirsty distillations of Germanness on the homefront—tends to overshadow how theThird Reich brought about radical linguistic ruptures within Europe’s national territories.In unprecedented numbers, native citizens became foreigners, foreigners becamedenizens of domination, and both were made subject to a strategically adulteratedGerman language. Through the chaos of conquest, occupation, and mass forcedmigration, the regime simultaneous gave rise to more hybrid forms of language andidentity throughout Europe than any philological field or social science is equipped toaccount for. Violently initiated into Germanness, witnesses like Jorge Semprún andPrimo Levi became the negative denizens of the Third Reich’s imagined community, asGermans saw their own language transmorgified and exported. Such is the linguisticbarbarism of 1930–50, a maelstrom of expropriated and juxtaposed codes and languages,unmoored from the normative language territories that had been established throughoutlate 19 th century.As a genre, Holocaust memoir has thus been faced with a number of confoundingrepresentational tasks, beyond that of systematized mass murder. It has had to account for78 Winlfried F. Schoeller. Jorge Semprún. Munich: Text & Kritik, 2006. 73. “Wenn Sie in diesem Jahrkeinen Deutschen, sondern mich eingeladen haben, hängt das irgendwie damit zusammen, daß Sie michvielleicht nicht für einen Fremden, für einen Ausländer halten. Und zweifelsohne haben Sie damitirgendwie recht.”135

the explosive semiodiversity of the European landscape under Nazi monolingualism; ithas had to tell stories for which any one national language is ill-suited; it has had todemonstrate the captive and refugee lifeworlds that totalitarianism both created anddestroyed; and it had to be conversant enough in the brutal idioms of fascism to critiquethem, despite the post-War world’s efforts to banish such speech from public discourse.With a vivid turn of phrase, Michael Rothberg claimed that the Nazi Holocaust wasitself an interdisciplinary project, borne up by the industrial confluence of the naturalsciences, historiography, medicine, geopolitical theory, semiotics, architecture, sociology,diplomacy and economics—on a transnational scale. 79 Sifting through sixty years ofphilosophical accounts of the death camps—Lyotard’s differend, Cohen’s tremendum,Arendt’s banality of evil—Rothberg concludes that the impasses encountered inrepresenting the death camps are rooted not so much in the unfathomable fact ofindustrial mass murder, but in our own epistemic stances and limitations. “Perhaps thefrequently intoned ‘impossibility’ of comprehending the Holocaust,” he writes, “arises inpart from the preservation of traditional disciplinary boundaries and structures ofknowledge.” 80To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. 81 Debate still swells about whetherAdorno’s bedeviling sentence about Auschwitz and literature was an injunction orsomething more speculative. 82 In style and syntax it seems to be nothing less than a moral79 Michael Rothberg. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 3.80 Rothberg 2000, 6.81 Theodor Adorno. ‘‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft.’’ Prismen. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1955. 30. “NachAuschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.”82 Gubar 2003, 240. Ibsch 2004, 48.136

condemnation—unless we allow the word “barbaric” to signify differently than theEnlightenment binaries of civilization versus brutality suggest. 83 With Julia Kristeva’setymology of barbaric in mind—as the Hellenistic onomatopoeia for foreign speech:“bari-bari”/“bla-bla” 84 —Antony Rowland sees Adorno’s sentence as descriptive ratherthan injunctive. Poetry after Auschwitz will have the quality of mixed, foreign speech—perhaps even of “inarticulate, unimportant scribbling.” 85 Part Two of this dissertationexplores the post-War legacy of Adorno’s dictum, of a German landscape populated byforeign and unintelligible speech.83 Antony Rowland. Tony Harrison and the Holocaust. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001.84 Kristeva 1992, 51.85 Rowland 2001, 258.137

Part TwoOn the Other Side: The Languages of Turkish German FictionScholars still have good reason to hesitate before proposing links between Jews andTurks in twentieth-century Germany. As recently as July 2008, the renowned researcherFaruk -en was locked out of the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen, which he founded,for having referred to Turks as the “new Jews of Europe” [Avrupa’nın yeni Yahudileri] ina May 19 column in the Turkish business newspaper Referans. 1 Though organizationsfrom the Turkish Community [Türkische Gemeinde] to the prominent author DilekZaptçıo#lu recognized how unadvisable such an equation was, they nonetheless protestedagainst the imperious backlash in the German press. Comparability notwithstanding,Dilek Zaptçıo#lu echoed -en’s sentiment with the equally broad claim that “EveryGerman Turk feels connected to the history of Jews in Germany.” 2 And the Director ofGermany’s influential Central Council for Jews, Stephan Kramer, insisted that -en was“neither a Holocaust relativizer nor an anti-Semite," and that the charges against himwere senseless. 3 For his part, -en gave the telling explanation that his remarks were notappropriate for a German audience, and that his two roles—as an expert on Turkey whenin Germany, and as an advocate for emigrants’ rights when in Turkey—had awkwardlycoalesced in the course of this affair.1 Faruk !en. “Avrupa'nın Yeni Yahudileri.” Referans 19 May 2008.2 Dilek Zaptçıo#lu. “Jeder Deutschtürke fühlt sich mit der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland verbunden.Wenn Faruk Sen wegen seines missglückten Vergleichs jetzt gehen soll, ist das absurd.” dietageszeitung [Berlin] 3 Jul. 2008.3 “Turkish Expert Resigns: Scholar Steps Down After Comparing Turks to Jews.” Der Spiegel Online 16Jul 2008.138

Yet even where resonances between the literary positions of German Jews and thoseof Turkish German authors are at their most salient, scholarly apprehension persists. AsDunphy would have it, “There is perhaps an interesting analogy between Kafka's feelingsabout not knowing Hebrew and Özdamar's on her lack of Arabic, but more generalparallels between the situation of German Jews in the first half of the twentieth centuryand that of German Turks in the second must be handled with the greatest of care.” 4 ForLeslie A. Adelson, this admonition to carefully “handle”—or abstain from handling—such constellations in the same critical setting has led to a situation in which “A Czechwriter such as Libuse Monikova (1945-1998), who lived in Germany after 1971, wasreadily celebrated as an heir to Kafka and Joyce, while Zafer -enocak's ties to Celan,Camus, Kafka, and others go largely unattended.” 5Already in 1987, Arlene Akiko Teraoka argued against this state of affairs, pointingout genealogical echoes between Kafka’s linguistic position and those of German Turks.Elizabeth Boa heeded this call with her incisive essay on the Kafkaesque “languagetraffic” in the works of three Turkish German women authors, Özdamar, Aysel Özakın,and Renan Demirkan. Adelson approaches this delicate historical constellation asfollows:Narratives in which victimized Turks make contact with victimized Jews are“touching” tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews, in part, because they evoke aculturally residual, referentially non-specific sense of guilt, blame, and danger.Additionally, one question to be foregrounded here pertains to the epistemological4 Grame Dunphy. “Review of Mary Howard. Interkulturelle Konfigurationen: Zur deutschsprachigenErzählliteratur von Autoren nichtdeutscher Herkunft.” The Modern Language Review 96.1 (2001):277–279.5 Leslie A. Adelson. “Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative,and Literary Riddles for the 1990s.” New German Critique 80 (2000): 93–124, 119.139

“touch” of such ambiguous referentiality. If Turkish and Jewish figures orreferences meet in German literary narratives of the recent past and do not merelystand in representationally for each other, what does the representational “touch”effect? 6The second half of this dissertation considers texts on the German Turkish literaryspectrum, texts that are the latter-day kin of Kafka’s and Levi’s adverse multilinguality inthe midst of the German language. Like Kafka’s “Returning Home” and Levi’s TheTruce, these texts register in spatial terms a historical and epistemological apprehensionabout German monolingualism. In his 2002 novel Snow, Orhan Pamuk picks up on thisstill inchoate relationship between the writerly positions of Franz Kafka and the authorsof Turkish German literature of migration.Scholarly accounts of the literature of migration in Germany have struggled to evokefitting spatial metaphors that account for the conceptual work of borderland writing.From Walraff’s metaphor of the “lowest of the low” to Dilek Zaptçıo#lu’s “living in twoworlds,” one’s choice of spatial metaphors has been a potent litmus test, signaling one’sdiscursive-political stance on any number of Turkish-German topics. 7 Standing inBerlin’s House of World Cultures in 2000, Leslie A. Adelson implicitly addressed theGerman head-of-state in a speech entitled “Against Between”:The “dialogue of cultures” that [Federal President] Johannes Rau and other publicfigures call for may be useful, even necessary, in the sociopolitical realm, but it failscompletely, oddly enough, in the imaginative realm of social production that is oftentaken to represent culture. Whoever mines literary texts of the 1990s and beyond for6 Adelson 2000, 102.7 Dilek Zaptçıo#lu. “Living in two Worlds.” Trans. Tes Howell. Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration1955–2005. Eds. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, Anton Kaes. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2007. 345–347. Günter Wallraff. Ganz Unten. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1985. Gert vonBassewitz. Morgens Deutschland, abends Türkei. Berlin: Fröhlich und Kaufmann, 1981. CarmineAbate. Zwischen Fabrik und Bahnhof. Bremen: CON Medien- und Vertriebgesellschaft, 1981.140

evidence of mutually exclusive collective identities in communicative dialogue withone another is not reading this literature for its most significant innovations. […]The imaginary bridge “between two worlds” is designed to keep discrete worldsapart as much as it pretends to bring them together.Spatial figuration thus remains a potent affective and philosophical resource forcritiquing, or affirming, such political tonguetwisters as “cultural integration”, “parallelsocieties”, and the fabled “clash of civilizations.” These tropes have aroused theimaginative energies of a range of artists—from the early novelists of Turkish migration,like Aras Ören and Güney Dal, to the filmmakers Tevfik Ba$er and Fatih Akın. The titleof Part Two of this dissertation, “On the Other Side,” is inspired by the Hamburg-basedfilmmaker Fatıh Akın’s most recent film of the same name, though it has been translatedinto English as The Edge of Heaven. Perhaps because Auf der anderen Seite is Akın’smost stridently and subtly multilingual film to date, it represents the belateddesublimation of the “two worlds” metaphor—of Turkishness and Germannessdisconnected by civilizational distance and subsequently reconnected by bridges ofintercultural good will.Though the film title can connote unbridgeable differences, it also suggests aProtagorian antilogy: the idea that two contradictory arguments may be heldsimultaneously, as expressed in the English phrase “on the other hand.” As such, Akın’sfilm is a narrative epistemology about how uncanny juxtapositions, missed encounters,and analectic simultaneity shape everyday experiences and pursuits of meaning in atransnational context—often in clear contravention of any given character’s self-conceptand semiotic repertoire. This ethics of simultaneity is embodied in the film’s multilingualarray of characters: Ayten, who speaks Turkish and English but no German; Nejat, who141

communicates with equal reticence in Turkish, English and German; and Susanne, whospeaks German and English only. 8 The film suggests these three characters as a kind oftriadic multilingual speech community, sharing Nejat’s apartment in !stanbul for anindefinite period, brought together by a cascade of rejuvenating yet fatal events—including the deaths of Ayten’s mother and Susanne’s daughter. Thus the film hinges ona constant recursive movement between differently-languaged speakers, among whom noone character or language maintains discursive authority on questions of culture, history,or identity.In the film, the Germanistik professor Nejat gives his father Ali, a former guestworker living in Bremen, a Turkish translation of a book he has read and enjoyed, SelimÖzdo#an’s novel Die Tochter des Schmieds [The Daughter of the Blacksmith]. 9 “Read thebook, OK dad?” [“Kitabı oku, baba, tamam mı?”] entreats Nejat. Though Ali indeedcompletes Özdo#an’s novel over the course of the film, Nejat’s gift (and symbolicimposition) present a subtle paradox, as Özdo#an’s German-language novel itselfremained untranslated into Turkish at the time of the film’s release. A cover bearing thetitle Demircinin kızı was produced for the fictional world of the film, acting as a kind ofpromissory note for the future of Turkish German culture—to labor toward a more fluidand expansive bilateral traffic in meanings and translations between the languages.It is this lateral, cross-language tension—an unwillingness to foreclose on meaning ortruth in one language only—that characterizes Özdamar and Pamuk’s textual project as8 Thomas Elsaesser has also suggested how the film foregrounds a certain “ethical calculus,” yet questionsof language and multilingualism do not inform his analysis. Thomas Elsaesser. “Ethical Calculus: TheCross-cultural Dilemmas and Moral Burdens of Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven.” Film Comment(May/June 2008).9 Selim Özdogan. Die Tochter des Schmieds. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2005.142

well. Though Pamuk writes in Turkish and Özdamar in German, their texts pulse with thetraces and dilemmas of the language “on the other side” of their respective textualthreshold. While Özdamar stakes her German-language project on its traffic with Turkishliterary and figural language, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow takes involuntary detours through thechannels of political capital that the German language commands.My readings, and particularly those concerned with Özdamar, differ from thoseoffered in German Studies thus far in that I claim that her novel Life is a Caravanserai is,despite its manifold multilingual features, a monolingual text, or what Cheesman hascalled “a polite fiction.” 10 Like a charcoal drawing that emulates an oil painting—in itsbrushstrokes, range of color, and depth of texture—Özdamar’s writing remains acutelyaware of the constraints of its monolingual medium.In proposing a positional kinship between these Turkish German axial authors andearly twentieth-century multilingual interlopers in German—Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus,Elias Canetti, Robert Antelme, and Primo Levi—this analysis joins an increasing numberof studies that seek to account for transnational texts from beyond the explanatory lensesof ethnic origin, non-nativeness, and intercultural dialogue. 1110 Cheesman 2007.11 On the concept of an “axial” author, see Tom Cheesman et al. “Axial Writing: TransnationalLiterary/Media Cultures and Cultural Policy.” Accessed 21 Aug. 2008.http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/wwwroot/cheesman.htm.143

Chapter ThreeÖzdamar: An Inn with Two DoorsLike an oblong piece of furniture being carried up a narrow staircase, Emine SevgiÖzdamar’s first novel gingerly bears one of the longest titles in twentieth century Germanliterary history—if we agree to disregard Fassbinder’s 1974 film adaptation of EffieBriest. 1 The author herself prefers the entire title Life is a Caravanserai Has Two Doors ICame in One I Went out The Other, and though the significance of its length rarelygarners critical attention, we might wonder: what was the German literary world to makeof this roomy title, a text in itself, which flouts the Gricean maxims of quantity andambiguity? 2The title itself takes up too much space and time, and most scholarship does not getpast the fifth word when mentioning it. At first glance, the title seems to be a clear andconcrete spatial story, consisting of 18 (out of 19) basic German words. ButCaravanserai? Specific to Persian and Turkish transit cultures since the mid-16 th century,it is likely that this one word, out of 19, spoils the transparency of the title for the vastmajority of German (and English) readers. And yet, the title itself is an act of translation,a declaration of metaphor, inviting and urging inquiry and vicarious experience.I propose to read Özdamar’s novel not as an autobiography, but as a parable aboutGerman Turkish literary history. This strange, two-door construction of the1 Effi Briest oder: Viele, die eine Ahnung haben von ihren Möglichkeiten und Bedürfnissen und dennochdas herrschende System in ihrem Kopf akzeptieren durch ihre Taten und es somit festigen und durchausbestätigen. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Tango Film, 1977.2 H. Paul Grice. “Logic and conversation.” Eds. P. Cole and J. Morgan. Syntax and Semantics, Vol 3. NewYork: Academic Press, 1975.144

caravanserai—we might imagine it as a sprawling roadhouse inn that mirrors thestructure of the journey itself—is emulated by its lengthy, cobbly title, which itself citesthe popular folksong “Day and Night” [Gündüz Gece], as sung by A$ık Veysel, Barı$Manço, Bülent Ersoy, the U.S. heavy-metal band Pentagram, and the Turkish Germanpop superstar Tarkan 3 :Uzun ince bir yoldayımGidiyorum gündüz geceBilmiyorum ne haldeyimGidiyorum gündüz geceDünyaya geldi#im andaYürüdüm aynı zamanda$ki kapılı bir handaGidiyorum gündüz geceI am on a long, narrow roadWalking day and nightI don’t know where I amI walk day and nightWhen I came to this earthI was already walkingIn a building with two doorsWalking day and nightÖzdamar’s title cites and performs a spatial figure, but also a widely known, classicTurkish lyric about ceaseless existential travel and the life path of the itinerant minstrels[a$ıklar] of Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. In the text of Caravanserai,the only explicitly two-doored house belongs to Aunt Pakize, who “lived in the gypsyquarter in a wooden house with two doors, because she was a whore. When the policecame in one door, she could take off through the other.” 4 The narrator, Pakize’s niecerefers to herself as having a “whore mouth,” and eventually joins her aunt on a “whoretrain” bound for West Germany. 5The figural triad between the narrator’s “whore mouth,” the “whore train,” toGermany, and aunt Pakize’s two-door house imbues the novel’s title with a new sense of3 A selection of audio recordings is accessible at http://www.turkishhan.org/asik%20veysel.htm.4 Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus deranderen ging ich raus. Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch. 1992. 374.5 Özdamar 1992, 379.145

a dissident domicile where one can escape out the back when the authorities arrive. Suchan ill-famed building on an indefinite “long, narrow road” might be one of the more aptmetaphors for Özdamar’s literary language, and indeed for the broader arc of TurkishGerman literary history itself—one indefinite yet non-sedentary dwelling, in which onecherishes the possibility of free egress and continued travel.Coming to VoiceIt has become a scholarly template of sorts to periodize Turkish German culturalproduction from 1970 to the present as an arc from compelled testimony to autonomouscritical intervention, from the labor of authenticity to that of imagination, fromethnicization to aesthetic discovery. In the arena of German Turkish film, Deniz Göktürkpostulated this shift in production and spectatorship as one from a “cinema of duty” to“the pleasures of hybridity.” 6 Over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, this hardwonmeta-narrative arose out of intensive conceptual cross-pollination among variousdisparate yet overlapping sectors of German society—including civil rights advocacyorganizations, academic and transnational interventions (ranging from the uptake ofSaid’s Orientalism and Black British Cinema to the general rise of antiessentialism in theacademy), and homegrown efforts among Germany’s pan-ethnic activist collectives likeKanak Attak.Yet, two decades on, this meta-narrative—of a critical-aesthetic project ripeningtowards the “freedom” and “self-assertion” that Sheila Johnson and Annette Wierschke6 Göktürk (2002) makes this observation in reference to Sarita Malik. “Beyond ‘The Cinema of Duty’? ThePleasures of Hybridity: Black British Film of the 1980s and 1990s.” Dissolving Views: Key Writings onBritish Cinema. Ed. Andrew Higson. London: Cassell, 1996.146

describe, respectively, as being the conceptual core of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s work—has potential literary-historical drawbacks. 7 Reliance on a notion of “coming to voice” inGerman texts, of a literary maturation out of a parochial, patriarchal, or otherwisehegemonic adolescence—often figured as the heritage language of “the fatherland”—threatens to obscure as much as it illuminates about the (literary) history of Turkishmigration to Germany. 8 In such a patently multilingual context, the notion of “coming tovoice” through literary fidelity to the German language—even when it takes the criticalstance of “speaking back”—deserves closer scrutiny.Nearly fifty years after the first labor recruitment agreement between Germany andTurkey, attempts to hone a genealogy of contemporary Turkish German writing oftenhinge on pragmatic publishing variables that obscure some of its most interestingparticularities and foreclose upon scholarly inquiry. The most consequent of thesevariables include: 1) whether a given text was written in German or Turkish (or Kurdish)2) whether and how it was translated, 3) whether the publication format (newspaper,chapbook, occasional anthology, etc.) lent or lends itself to archiving and reproduction, 4)how the text was introduced to German literary institutions, and 5) whether its author fitswell within a normative legacy of mass Turkish labor (im)migration to Germany. 97 Sheila Johnson. “Transnationale Ästhetik des türkischen Alltags: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Das Leben isteine Karawanserei.” The German Quarterly 74.1 (2001): 37–57.8 See for instance Kamakshi P. Murti. “Review of Annette Wierschke. Schreiben als Selbstbehauptung:Kulturkonflikt und Identitdt in den Werken von Aysel Özakın, Alev Tekinay und Emine Sevgi Özdamar.”German Studies Review 22.2 (1999): 354–355. Sohelia Ghaussy. ”Das Vaterland verlassen: NomadicLanguage and “Feminine Writing” in Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei.” TheGerman Quarterly 72.1 (1999): 1–16.9 Murti notes the case of Aysel Özakın who, after ten years publishing in West Germany, left for Englandin 1990. Murti 1999.147

Such inherent variables of transnational writing have garnered little resonance ineven the most inclusionist and multicultural of German literary histories, which oftenchoose monolingualism as their common and unproblematized denominator. In pointingout the dearth of coverage about migrant literature in Wellbery et al.’s encyclopedic NewHistory of German Literature (2004), B. Venkat Mani notes—with prudent uncertainty—that grappling with the transnational circumstances of Turkish German literature requiresmore than an inclusionist solution: “What kinds of beginnings are being carved out forthe multicultural production? What are the documents, how are they being catalogued?” 10Not unlike Kafka’s parable of “The Burrow,” the programmatic institutional pathway bywhich the literary domain of Turkish German writing has developed leaves many of itsmost promising points of entry either blocked, camouflaged, or left in disrepair.Aided by a reading of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Life is a Caravanserai as a literaryhistoricalnarrative, this chapter opens up some questions about the monolingualistunderpinnings of literary historiographies that view Turkish writing in Germany as anexodus out of the cramped postures of semilingual testimony into the expanses ofaesthetic sovereignty. Main contexts for this rereading of Özdamar are 1) the de factomultilingualism and aesthetic internationalism of the late guest-worker era (1970–1980),2) the institutional push for German as a literary lingua franca for Turkish culturalintegration in Germany (1980–1990), and 3) the figural interplay—or lack thereof—10 B. Venkat Mani. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. IowaCity, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2007. 188. David E. Wellbery, Judith Ryan, Hans UlrichGumbrecht, et al., eds. A New History of German Literature. Cambridge: Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 2004. The controversial distant-reading approach promoted by Franco Moretti—inwhich simply counting the number of texts composed in a certain period according to how they fare onthe above five criteria—may offer scholarship on Turkish German literary history a more steadyepistemological foundation. Franco Moretti. Graphs, Maps, Trees. London: Verso, 2005.148

etween mono- and multilingualism in two intimately embattled novels, FeridunZaimoglu’s Leyla (2006) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Caravanserai (1992). Taken inconcert, these three literary-historical events contribute to a rethinking of multilingualauthorship in the literary history of Turkish Germany.What is Niyazi’s Business in German Literature?Sehr GeehrterHerrHofmann.Arbeitsamt II.Nicht immer schreien!Nicht immer nein sagen!Ich bin nicht dein Diener.Ich bin nicht verbrecherIch bin arbeiter.Arbeiter arbeiten immer.Arbeiter zahlen steuer.Du machen bitteMeine papier ordnungWieder.DearMisterHofmann.Labor Bureau II.Not always shout!Not always say no!I am not your servant.I am not criminal.I am a worker.Worker always work.Workers pay tax.You make pleasemy papers in orderagain.—Aras Ören, What is Niyazi’s Business on NaunynStreet?, 1973 1111 Aras Ören, Was Will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse. Ein Poem. Trans. H. Achmed Schmiede und JohannesSchenk in collaboration with the author. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1973. 68. Berlin Üçlemesi. !stanbul: EvrimMatbaaçlık Ltd., 1980. 88-9. I have modified the standard English title to correspond with Ören’soriginal Turkish title Niyazi’nin Naunyn Soka!ında "#i ne?, which connotes, alongside the maincharacter’s desires and intentions, his “labor” or “business” [!$i].149

Niyazi Gümü$kılıç is most often cited as the first fictional creation of Turkish migrationto Germany. Nonetheless, he has all but fallen out of the literary-historical archive.Relatively “ungoogleable” today and of ambiguous national affiliation—(“Was it writtenin German or Turkish?”)—the hero of Aras Ören’s 1973 Berlin milieu poem What isNiyazi’s Business on Naunyn Street? hovers on the edge of German literary history—despite Niyazi’s status as post-War Germany’s first Turkish literary subject. In Ören’spoem—which was first written in Turkish—Niyazi is laconically introduced with thefollowing set of traits:Iyi Almanca bilirGiyimine özenirVe kulaklarının altına inenFavorileri vardîr.He can speak German wellTakes care of his appearanceAnd has sideburns down toBelow his ears.Shortly thereafter, 1 the poem states his reason for residence in Berlin-Kreuzberg:Bu Almanya i%i çıkınca,Herkes gibi ben deDedim kendikendime:Almanya bir küçük Amerika.When the thing with Germany came up,I said to myself,Like everybody else, me too:Germany is a little America. 2Rita Chin and Tom Cheesman have offered cogent readings of Ören’s 63-page poem. 3 Ofnote for the present context is the lack of import afforded to the German language (whichis set in a parallel equivalence with “appearance” and “sideburns,” connoting artifice andcontemporary fashion) and the German nation (which is brushed off as a purgatorialversion of the eldest NATO sibling, the United States.) With the preemptive description1 Ören 1980, 34-35.2 Ören 1980, 38.3 Rita C.-K. Chin. “Imagining a German Multiculturalism: Aras Ören and the Contested Meanings of the‘Guest Worker,’ 1955-1980.” Radical History Review 83 (2002): 44–72. Cheesman 2007.150

“He can speak German well/Takes care of his appearance,” the reader is given tounderstand that s/he need worry neither about Niyazi’s linguistic proficiencies nor hiscapacity to get along sociably in Germany.Thus though Niyazi is regarded as the first Turkish German poetic text to reach aGerman reading public, the language and culture of the host country remain quiteincidental topics for the narrative. The location of Naunyn Street is a site for labor-rightsstruggles on an international scale; yet it observes no pregiven metonymic relationship toGermany or Germanness per se.Ören’s poem chronicles the dynamics of social solidarity in a working-class Berlinneighborhood surrounded by the GDR on three sides, a working-class isthmus of intraandtransnational migration where landlords were rumored to be relatively more open torental applicants with Turkish-sounding surnames. Against this backdrop, questions ofNiyazi’s own identity, his struggles with or against cultural assimilation into a Germannational community, and illustrations of Turkish cultural identity, play an inconsequentialrole in this poem. The narrator prefers to delve into the family history of his ethnicGerman neighbors, the Kutzers, who—it turns out—were also immigrant expellees fromEast Prussia. 4 The narrative is localist and lateral in orientation, surpassing any sustainedthematization of national identity.Next to international class solidarity and pan-ethnic affiliation among migrants, thetopicality of national language and culture seems to register as little more than faintdetail. Reflecting on the publication context of this poem, Sievers observes how4 Ören 1973, 25.151

Ören’s poems perfectly matched Rotbuch [Publishing House’s] contemporary titles,including several books on Marxism, such as Bernd Rabehl’s History and Class Struggleor D. Rjazanov’s Marx and Engels for Beginners but also poems, stories and essays byGerman left wing writers, such as F. C. Delius and Peter Schneider. 5The penultimate section of the poem is a climactic conversation between Niyazi andHorst Schmidt, in which Horst attempts to rally the glum Niyazi to labor solidarity:We should begin with this street,Niyazi, like others have begun on their streets.We live here, and here,On this street, in this neighborhood, we are many, many—like him, like you, likeme—who are pushed up against the wall every dayAnd many don’t know what to do. […]When Niyazi asks where this effort should start, Schmidt replies:Way at the bottom [Ganz unten], Niyazi, way at the bottom.First we have to show them how they can get what’s rightfully theirs.They have to learn to push back against people who take these rights away. Do youunderstand?They should start petitions, for example,Make demands.Write to every officewith every little bit of their Germanand go to every person, every bureau,everywhere, where someone is taking the rights away,5 Wiebke Sievers. “Writing Politics: the Emergence of Immigrant Writing in West Germany and Austria.”Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34.8 (2008): n.p.152

that are available to them. 6Here, using German is not a literary or aesthetic choice, nor a signal of communitymembership of any kind, but rather a pragmatic tool for securing civil rightsinternationally.With Niyazi as one of its first and primary exemplars, early guest-worker fiction andpoetry was of a localist and internationalist socio-political bearing than its morenationally oriented successors in the late 1980s left behind, gaining it—in the words ofone critic—the damp retrospective moniker of “proletarian prose.” 7 Published in heritagelanguage newspapers like the Turkish Anadil [Mother Tongue] and the Italian CorreoD’Italia [The Mail from Italy], the hypotexts of migration were to be found not preservedbetween book covers, but folded over in leaflets and newspapers.Tilting the Literary CubeAn overarching dilemma is how and to what effect the internationalist, multilingual webof migrant texts and hypotexts in the 1970s and early 1980s graduated into a migrationliterature in the 1990s in which mastery of the German language played an omnipresentand exclusionary role. How do literary scholars, and the authors they critique, come toterms with this development? I read Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s 1992 novel as an oblique,6 Ören 1973, 67.“Wir sollten mit dieser Straße anfangen, / Niyazi, wie andere in ihren Straßen anfangen. /Hier wohnen wir, und hier, / In dieser Straße, in dieser Gegend, sind wir viele, viele, die wie er, wie du,wie ich, / Jeden Tag von neuem an die Wand gedrückt werden, /Und viele wissen nicht, was tun. […]Ganz unten, Niyazi, ganz unten. / Erst einmal müssen wir ihnen zeigen wie sie zu dem kommen, wasihr Recht ist. / Sie müssen lernen, gegen die vorzugehen, die ihnen diese Rechte wegnehmen. /Verstehst du?/ Eingaben machen sollen sie, zum Beispiel, /Forderungen stellen, /Mit dem eigenenbißchen Deutsch / An jede Stelle schreiben /Und hingehen /Zu jeder Person, zu jeder Behörde./ Überall,wo man ihnen das Recht wegnimmt/ das ihnen zusteht.”7 Henryk Broder. “I am Not a Bridge.” Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005. Eds. DenizGöktürk, David Gramling, Anton Kaes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 419.153

figural response to this dilemma, as a text which both critiques and partakes in theprogressive monolingualization of migration literature over the course of the 1980s.With this clash and coalescence of multilingualism and monolingualism in mind, myreading of Özdamar’s work will focus less on its capacity to expand and hybridize theGerman language—as Horrocks, Seyhan, Göktürk, Boa, and others have shown—than onhow the text highlights the expressive limits of German. For Caravanserai, thismonolingualism is a productive constraint that fuels figuration rather than obstructing it.In lieu of the linguistic expansionism described in much of the secondary literature onÖzdamar’s work, it might make sense to speak of an ascetic writing practice—ofrenouncing or suspending one semiotic domain of the writerly imagination in favor ofanother. To this end, Özdamar’s novel engages in what Meir Sternberg, in his 1981article on polylingualism and translation, called “conceptual reflection,” in which a textRetains […] not so much the verbal forms of the foreign code as the underlyingsocio-cultural norms, semantic mapping of reality, and distinctive referential range,segmentations and hierarchies. Conceptual reflection thus lies at the crossroads oflanguage and reality. 8Where Sternberg’s notion of “conceptual reflection” turns on the frictions between twodistinctly encoded languages—Aramaic and Hebrew, for instance—my reading willfocus, analogously, on those between the multilingual lifeworld of the narrator and themonolingual constraints of the text. Therefore I am less concerned with identifying thespecific signifying interferences between German and Turkish—which Göktürk has aptlydemonstrated—than I am in the interference of multilingual practices into a singlelanguagework.8 Sternberg 1981, 11.154

Helpful in this context is Maria Kotsaftis’ passing reference to what she calls the“literary cubism” in the Italian German author Franco Biondi’s writing, a style of writing“where fragments […] from disparate sources are taken and reassembled in a manner thatexposes the seams and ruptures of a seemingly homologous discourse.” To pursue hercritical metaphor a bit further, one might consider Biondi’s writing practice in German acube whose other rhetorical and stylistic “sides”—say, those arising out of Italian—areindicated apophatically as uncanny absences or spatialized distances. To reintroduce aterm from the introductory chapter, such texts as Özdamar’s and Biondi’s might betermed henolingual—in that, while generally upholding the meta-formal constraint ofliterary monolingualism, they nonetheless tilt or shake the cube of linguistic subjectivity,exposing its other, or neighboring, sides.This is a different claim than Kotsaftis’ contention that Biondi expands “theboundaries of the dominant language.” (This often-invoked metaphor of the expansionand enrichment of dominant languages harbors a hidden monolingualism.) Rather, textssuch as Caravanserai keenly observe the binding power of such language thresholds,illustrating how these boundaries are immediately consequent for the lyrical andrepresentational project at hand.Is There a Guest Worker in this Text?Since shortly after the contentious international debut of Günter Walraff’s exposé TheLowest of the Low in 1985, scholarly research has gone to great lengths to decommission155

the iconic power of the word “guest worker.” 9 In their contribution to the volume TurkishCulture in German Society Today, Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan aimed to clearup a few misunderstandings:Contemporary Germany has a diverse and diversifying population of de factoimmigrants who form an integral part of German society as ethnic minorities. Theterm Gastarbeiter is clearly no longer—if it ever was—suitable to describe these socialgroups. 10In their subsequent reading of Franco Biondi’s 1984 novel Farewell to the ShatteredYears, Fischer and McGowan accordingly describe the main character Mamo as follows:[He] now begins to feel 'foreign'. He dreams of studying his face in a mirror: that is,he is forced to view his identity as an image of himself as transmitted to him in thegaze of the powerful, a theme which echoes women's writing of the period. Hisidentity as a Gastarbeiter is part of a script written by the socio-economic forceswhich created the Gastarbeiter in the first place. 11Over the course of the 1980s, the notion that being a guest worker was an existentiallyimpossible contradiction-in-terms gained favor in the Center-Left press, as the term itselfbecame an emblem of the early Kohl administration’s anti-immigration policies. In thescholarly context, the word has come to be viewed as an anachronistic stumbling-block toall manner of inquiry into contemporary German social phenomena—whether migrant,postmigrant, or nonmigrant. Levent Soysal expresses it as follows:The term Gastarbeiter continues to captivate our scholarly and popular imagination.It has been almost a customary sign of credibility to make a reference to the guest9 Rafik Schami and Franco Biondi. “Literatur der Betroffenheit: Bemerkungen zur Gastarbeiterliteratur.”Zu Hause in der Fremde: Ein bundesdeutsches Ausländer-Lesebuch. Ed. Christian SchaffernichtFischerhude: Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, 1981. 134–5.10 Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan. “From Pappkoffer to Pluralism: On the Development of MigrantWriting in the German Federal Republic.” Turkish Culture in German Society Today. Eds. DavidHorrocks and Eva Kolinsky. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996, 1–18. 111 Fischer and McGowan 1996, 9.156

worker when writing about migrants in Germany and Europe. Even those who setout to evidence the “changes” in the status of migrants find it hard to refrain fromthe practice. In our narratives, migrants, and Turks in particular, appear as perpetualguest workers, arrested in a state of cultural and social liminality. 12“Refraining from the practice” of referencing the guest worker in social science orliterary history is assumed to ensure that readers or researchers can engage more subtlelywith Turkish German culture, narrative, and everyday life. Yet it is the emblematic guestworkertrope itself—and not the elaborate international infrastructure of recruitment andmobilization it describes—that is thus seen as intruding into today’s more differentiatedcivic discourses around migration—essentializing, ethnicizing, and de-voicing all ittouches. This political and critical moratorium on calling forth guest-workerrepresentations in the context of migration discourse has become, to invoke Rey Chow, akind of iconophobic reflex. Denouncing the iconicity of the Gastarbeiter is oftenconsidered tantamount to redressing the specific and immutable historical circumstancesto which it refers.In this sense, Max Frisch’s epiphanic axiom that “One called for a workforce, buthumans came” threatens a historical elision of sorts. 13 As indicated by the title of a recentanthology of “Turkish German life histories”—Gekommen und Geblieben—the WestGerman guest worker program poses a dilemma for historiography—one that no nationalculture has been particularly fond of attending to: is a “life history” tellable (i.e.,publishable) only if the subject of that story “stays”? Highlighting this meta-narrative12 Levent Soysal. “Labor to Culture: Writing Turkish Migration to Europe.” The South Atlantic Quarterly102.2/3 (2003) 491–508, 493.13Alexander J. Seiler. Siamo italiani. Gespräche mit italienischen Arbeitern in der Schweiz. Zürich: EVZ-Verlag 1965. 7.157

predicament, Levent Soysal cites German census data showing that, between 1954 and1994, while 21.6 million non-citizens “immigrated,” at least 15.5 million left the federalterritory during the same period. Many of those who did not “stay” included prominentauthors like Aysel Özakın and filmmakers Tevfik Ba$er and Erden Kiral; their accessionsremain a forgotten line item in the balance sheet of German Studies.Given the value afforded to “coming and staying” as opposed to “coming and going,”it is no surprise that the predominant bearing of Turkish German literary historiographypreferences unidirectional settlement, and not, say, of transmigration over the course of along and unpredictable life. 14 As a consequence, there is little enduring research interestin what “temporary foreign labor power”—or non-immigrant guest workers—mightmean for German Studies.Lifting the BanDespite efforts to document “50 years of labor migration to Germany,” 15 guest workers inthe literary-historical context are now remote antecedents of their more differentiatedsuccessor generations, who are better known as immigrants or Germans of foreigndescent. As the first generation of Turkish guest workers begins to celebrate theireightieth birthdays (whether in Germany, Turkey, or elsewhere), their iconicity is retiringwith them. 16Yet more than seven million people did “guest work” in Germany between 1956–1974, and this legacy represents specific multilingual, transnational, and spatial14 Cheesman 2007.15 See for instance the web archive and migration museum initiative Dokumentationszentrum and Museumüber die Migration in Deutschland, www.domit.de.16 Hilke Lorenz. “Antonios Abschied: Wie ‘Gastarbeiter’ an ihrem Lebensende begleitet werden.”Südwestrundfunk 4 Mar. 2007.158

circumstances that literary-historical discourses about migration during of the 1980s and90s eagerly overlooked. Early recruits from Italy and Turkey were assigned to barracksthat, a decade earlier, had housed the Third Reich’s foreign forced laborers and ethnicGermans expelled from Eastern Europe after 1945. 17 When the Christian Democraticgovernment of Konrad Adenauer announced the first in a series of foreign-workerrecruitment initiatives in late 1954, it was not responding to an absolute labor shortage; atleast one million working-age West Germans were unemployed at the time. What guestworkers offered was the kind of anational, spatial motility that early EuropeanCommunity governments were just then learning to effectively harness. 18The private sector strategists of the West German Economic Miracle prized earlyguest workers above their German counterparts: they were unfettered by daily familyconstraints and were easily transferred to new sites when sudden, critical labor shortagesstruck (often in industry and mining towns along the Soviet sector borders, where manyWest German citizens dared not settle). Because of their presumed “temporary status,”foreign guest workers could be counted on to take up only nominal roles in unions andpolitical advocacy organizing. Furthermore, their lack of German-language trainingprecluded all but the most fleeting association with the local populace in the on- and offhours—atleast initially. This predestined early guest workers for tedious and isolatingtasks requiring little bidirectional linguistic exchange with other workers on the job-site.17 Mark Terkessidis. Migranten. Hamburg: Rotbuch, 2000. 16.18 Following Kaufmann et al. (2004), I understand motility in terms of “mobility as capital” or as “thepotential and actual capacity of goods, information or people to be mobile both geographically andsocially.” Vincent Kaufmann, Manfred Max Bergman, and Dominique Joye. “Motility: Mobility asCapital.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28.4 (2004): 745–756.159

Thus, the gambit of positions, spaces, and experiences that came to be known andreified over the course of the 1970s as “the guest worker milieu” arose through strategicdesign: 1) by reusing the evacuated sites of previous social segregation between thenative and non-native (forced labor barracks, expellee camps, on-site dormitories) 2) byprecluding the possibility of a locally-situated temporality through the constantimminence of site-transfer or contract termination, 3) by investing recruited “laborpower” with the commodified, market-premium motility necessary for transferringquantities of labor from one site to another, 4) by fortifying “the language barrier”between Germans and guest workers with spatial and symbolic partitions in theworkplace and housing. This hattrick—spatial segregation, permanent status as a mobilelabor reserve, and the fortification of the “language barrier”—made the “guest-workerexperience” a midcentury limit-case in the hegemony of space over time.The temporal virtues of development, self-identity, civic investiture, autochthonousnarrative, and linguistic assimilation were kept indefinitely subordinate to transit, nonsequitor,contingency, and functional multilingualism. One could speak of a kind oflateral (as opposed to progressive) grammar underlying these labor initiatives, which hadbeen conceived in the rhetorical spirit of the “free movement of workers betweenEuropean countries” in the early days of the European Coal and Steel Community. 19 IfMichel Foucault could claim in 1964 that “We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are inthe epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the19 Göktürk et al. 2007, 1–30.160

dispersed,” 20 Germany’s foreign labor recruits in the 1960s were the living vanguard ofthat epoch-making condition.Dursun Akçam cites the potent summation of one guest worker, Memi$ Bozkir, whodescribed this carefully engineered set of conditions as follows: “For me, the Germansare like a picture. I see it, it moves, it speaks.” 21 Such articulations index a poetic traditionof spatial and linguistic subalterity based in temporary labor recruitment, one that is notreadily amenable to translation into the monolingual integrationism of such 1980sinstitutions as the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize, which will be discussed in detail below.A kind of “guest-worker taboo” remains in force in many scholarly domains. ForLeslie Adelson, this divestiture is justified in the following terms:This is less about the historical content of any national narrative than it is about theoptical illusion to which we fall prey when we mistake figural representation forcultural alterity stripped of historical narrative. For some time now, Turks inGermany have been made to bear the burden of this illusion as and on the face ofthings. 22With good reason, Adelson identifies the rhetorical excesses that crowd therepresentation of Turkishness in German literature. Yet as Chow suggests, stridentdivestiture from any iconic motif tends “to conflate the […] instability of the sign withexistential freedom.” 23 In other words, by no longer citing the guest worker as a valid and“truly existing” socio-historical position in West German history, all manner of20 “Nous sommes à l’époque du simultané, nous sommes à l’époque de la juxtaposition, à l’époque duproche et du lointain, du côte à côte, du dispersé.” Foucault 1984, 46–49.21 Dursun Akçam, Deutsches Heim—Glück allein. Wie Türken Deutsche sehen. Göttingen: Lamuv, 1982.37. “Die Deutschen sind für mich wie ein Bild. Ich sehe es, es bewegt, es spricht.”22 Leslie A. Adelson. “Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative,and Literary Riddles for the 1990s.” New German Critique 80 (2000): 93–124. 123.23 Rey Chow. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press,2002. ix.161

discourses are absolved from accounting for the specific circumstances of those peoplewho were, or continue to have been, West Germany’s foreign labor recruits from the1960s and 1970s. While “integration” continues to thrive thematically in the op-edsections of major newsweeklies, the cultural history of the several million guest workersof the first and second generation (born between 1940 and 1955, roughly) are becomingincreasingly eclipsed on the historiographic horizon. This means that fewer literary,historical, and social research endeavors take the transnational life-worlds of early guestworkers as an independent domain of inquiry. 24Rethinking the Tactical Invention of Guest-Worker LiteratureThat a localist and internationalist literary politics of social solidarity, designed formultiple audiences in multiple languages, tended to trump national, ethnic, and religiousaffiliations in early Turkish German cultural production is evident in Güney Dal’s firstnovel, published by edition der 2 in Berlin in 1979, a narrative account of the 1973 “wildstrike” at Cologne’s Ford factory. 25 The variant titling between the Turkish and Germanversions of Dal’s novel indicates the “localizing” translational dynamics of early guestworkerpublishing—that is, the strategic procedure of sculpting a translation towards thepresumed socio-political norms of a given community of readers. 26 Where the 1976Turkish version had been titled Labor Exiles ["# sürgünleri], Brigitte Schreiber-Grabitz’German translation released three years later foregrounded ethnicity with the title WhenAli Hears the Bells Ring [Wenn Ali die Glocken läuten hört]. Where, for Turkish readers,24 For an important counter-example to this tendency, see DOMiT. Projekt Migration. Cologne: KölnischerKunstverein, 2005.25 On this watershed event, see “The Turks Rehearsed the Uprising” in Göktürk et al. 2007, 42.26 Anthony Pym. The Moving Text: Localization, Translation and Distribution. Philadelphia: JohnBenjamins, 2004.162

the novel had signaled the collective historical experience of temporary foreign laborrecruitment, its German-translated title stressed the individualized alterity of an “Ali”amid the tolling bells of the German workday. 27Feminist internationalism also informed the principal narrative conflicts of earlymigration literature, including Aysel Özakın’s 1983 novel Die Leidenschaft der Anderen[The Passion of Others] and Helma Sanders-Brahms’s 1976 film Shirins Hochzeit[Shirin’s Wedding], which foregrounded women’s solidarity across national identity orethnic background. In 1980, the Turkish military coup accelerated this prevalent civilrights agenda: both Özakın and her contemporary, Fakir Baykurt, were among those whoemigrated to Germany as a result of Turkish domestic political turmoil at the turn of thedecade. This chain of events only reinforced the internationalism at the helm of migrationliterature in the early 1980s, a literature for which the BRD provided only one sphere ofinfluence among others.Sievens points to an incipient internationalism in guest worker poetics that stressedlinkages between workers of various cultural origins. Gino Chiellino’s poems “The NextMorning” and “Guestworkers in Italy” were appeals for solidarity among guest workersin different countries—Turkish steel workers in Italy as well as Italian workers inGermany. 28 Like Ören’s Niyazi, Rafik Schami’s “The Potato Glasses” [“DieKartoffelbrille”] stresses coalitions among guest workers and German citizens. 29 Yusuf27 Cheesman 2007, 145–192.28 Gino Chiellino. “Gastarbeiter in Italien.” Im neuen Land. Eds. F. Biondi, Y. Naoum, R. Schami, R. andTaufiq, S. Bremen: CON, 1980. 5.29 Rafik Schami. “Die Kartoffelbrille.” Ein Gastarbeiter ist ein Türke. PoLiKunst-Jahrbuch '83. Augsburg:PoLiKunst, 1983. 74–83.163

Naoum’s short story “To Have a Boss like That” [“So einen Chef haben”] similarlystressed workers’ strength in numbers. 30The literary rubric “guest-worker literature” was tactical from its inception—placingas much critical stress on “worker” as on “guest”—as many of its initial exemplars fromthe PoLiKunst and Südwind literary collectives emphatically pointed out. YükselPazarkaya writes:We consciously use the term Gastarbeiter that has been imposed on us, in order toexpose the irony within it. The ideologues have managed to shove together theconcepts “guest” and “worker,” although there have never been guests who worked.The provisional status that is supposed to be expressed in the word “guest” hasbeen shattered by reality. Gastarbeiter are in fact an established segment of the WestGerman population. 31It was this very sentiment, reframing guest-workers as a permanent presence in Germansociety—a patently justifiable claim from a civil rights point of view—that dovetailedwith a West German Center-Left discourse that would transmogrify Turkish Germanyfrom a transnational to a subnational space, as the administration of Helmut Kohl began.30 Yusuf Naoum. “So einen Chef haben.” Im neuen Land. Eds. F. Biondi, Y. Naoum, R. Schami, R. andTaufiq, S. Bremen: CON, 1980. 6-28.31 Schami and Biondi 1981, 134–5, n.l.164

From Internationalism to SpeechlessnessAn image of helpless subalternity […]characterizes not only the perception of migrantsand the minoritized as a whole, but also all of theirutterances.—Hito Steyerl, Can the Subaltern Speak German? 32Teraoka points to a corpus of literary texts, films, plays and television shorts in the mid-1980s that, by suppressing representations of multilinguality, gave rise to a speechlessTurkish figure in German society. Franz Xavier Kroetz’ 1984 Fear and Hope in the BRD[Furcht und Hoffnung der BRD] features a Turk who laughs but never speaks. In BothoStrauss’ Big and Small [Groß und Klein], a Turk blusters about in Germanmonosyllables, giving his German wife such commands as: “Beer,” “Come,” “Shit.” 33Iconic speechlessness reached a highpoint with Günter Walraff’s best-selling GanzUnten—tellingly translated into French as Tête de Turc—in which a stealth investigativereporter goes undercover as the Turkish daylaborer “Ali.” Walraff writes:The foreigner’s German I used in my new life was so rough and ready and clumsythat anyone who had ever made the effort to really listen to a Turk or Greek livinghere would have noticed that something wasn’t quite right. I simply left out the finalsyllables of some words, reversed the order of sentences, or often, just spoke aslightly broken Kolsch or Cologne dialect. However, strange as it may seem, no oneever became the least suspicious of me. These few little changes were enough.[...] Of course I was not really a Turk. But one must disguise oneself in order tounmask society, one must deceive and dissimulate in order to find out the truth. I32 Hito Steyerl. “Can The Subaltern Speak German?” Trans. Aileen Derieg. Accessed 18 August 2008.http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/03/steyerl-strands01en. Hito Steyerl, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez,and Nghi Ha Kien. Spricht die Subalterne deutsch?: Migration und postkoloniale Kritik. Münster:Unrast, 2003.33 Arlene Akiko Teraoka. “Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back.” Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 77–101. 198.165

still don't know how an immigrant copes with the daily humiliations, the hostilityand the hate. 34One is led to wonder how Walraff’s assessments of Turkish loneliness in Germany mayhave differed had he himself been prepared to have a relaxing chat in Turkish (and notjust in his imperfect Gastarbeiterdeutsch) during his year as the guest worker Ali. A bitof hearty conversation in Turkish from time to time might have saved him from representingwhat Homi K. Bhabha would later stridently diagnose as the “lonely figurethat John Berger named the seventh man." 35 Adding inanimacy to loneliness, Bhabhaultimately sums up the Turk as leading “the life of a double, the automaton.” 36The sedimentation of these images—of “the head of a Turk” without a singlelanguage, let alone two—seems to have been taken up whole in institutional andscholarly contexts. In her co-edited collection A Not Only German Literature with HaraldWeinrich, Irmengard Ackerman was thus able to dub German-writing immigrants as“spokesmen for the speechless” in contradistinction to their countrymen and women who“remain mute in their suffering.” 37 Already in 1985, Teraoka began to identify in thistrend “a silencing of the aesthetic of the other.” 38Bhabha’s gloss in The Location of Culture is, of course, telling:How opaque the disguise of words.… He [the Turk] treated the sounds of theunknown language as if they were silence. To break through his silence. He learnt34 Günter Wallraff. Lowest of the Low. Trans. Martin Chalmers. London: Methuen London, 1988. 2.35 Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 139. John Berger. A Seventh Man:Migrant Workers in Europe. New York: Viking Press, 1975.36 Bhabha 1994, 316.37 Irmgard Ackermann and Harald Weinrich, eds. Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur: zurStandortbestimmung der Ausländerliteratur. Munich: Piper, 1986. 248–251.38 Teraoka 1987, 22166

twenty words of the new language. But to his amazement at first, their meaningchanged as he spoke them…. Is it possible to see the opaqueness of the words? 39How is it that the opaque, new language is the only language worth considering in such avivid, psychological depiction? The possibility of Turkish-speaking camaraderie orpleasurable multilingual exchange of any kind plays as little of a role in Bhabha’sanalysis as it had in Berger’s text fifteen years prior. Yet even in one of the mostsustained and poignant interventions on what she called “speech of the uncounted,”Begüm Özden Fırat overlooks the stark omission of multilingualism in Bhabha’saccount. 40While an image of the languageless Turk was being circulated in the domestic cultureindustry and implicitly seconded in the academic sector, migrant authors were grapplingwith the topic from a vastly different angle. For Aras Ören, speechlessness was theoverall historical condition of modern Europe in a “turbulently developing world ofcommunication technologies.” 41 Seconding Enzensberger’s call for a new consciousnessindustry that might counter mass media incursions into civic life, Ören claimed in 1986thatEurope is the reflection of my face, and I am the reflection of the face of Europe.My speechlessness is also Europe’s. […] This mutual impact signifies an expansionof my creative energies and allows them to become an integral part of the creativeEuropean zeitgeist. My search for the new language contributes to this movement inthat it can overcome the speechlessness on the borders of language. 4239 Bhabha 1994. 165.40 Leslie A. Adelson. “Opposing Oppositions: Turkish German Questions in Contemporary GermanStudies.” German Studies Review 17.2 (1994): 305–330. Göktürk. 2002. Soysal 2003.41 Aras Ören. “Chamisso Prize Acceptance Speech.” Germany in Transit. Eds. Deniz Göktürk, DavidGramling, and Anton Kaes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 392.42 Ören 2007, 393.167

Thus, as early as the mid-1980s a struggle over the definition of “speechlessness” beganto take shape, as exemplified by Ören’s implicit contestatory response to Walraff. As inthe domain of Holocaust narrative discussed in Chapter Two, this theme of“speechlessness” has not been sufficiently explored in its multilingual context.Otobüs: A Nationally Indifferent ExcursionBy way of approaching the discursive invention of “speechlessness” in Turkish Germanhistory, I will briefly turn to a 1976 film Otobüs (Dir. Tunç Okan), which neitherintervenes in the German cultural archive, nor resists ethnicized representation in anycoherent way, nor cosmopolitanizes German society, nor stakes unambivalent claims.Despite (or because of) its unlikely profile for uptake into the canon of Turkish Germantexts, this film helps to carve out a genealogical analysis of Turkish German fictions.Through its representations of space, multiple-language use, and apparent disinterest inGermany as the “cultural space in question,” the film indicates how the evanescence ofthe guest-worker motif was not just a narrative maturation, but a shift in focus: from a(nationally indifferent) poetics of relation to a (nationally construed) politics of voice.Though Otobüs’s band of protagonists are both Turks and German Turks, the film liesfar afield of what counts today under the category Turkish German fiction. In the film,Germany appears to play only a minor role, and ethno-national identifications—whetherGerman, Turkish, or otherwise—are never mentioned. Yet the film does not hesitate tostage clearly recognizable ethnicized figures, including the speechless guest worker “asand on […] the face of things.” 43 For these initial reasons alone, Otobüs seems to be no43 Adelson 2005, 16.168

prime contender for uptake in the critical Turkish German canon of the twenty-firstcentury. 44As the film credits roll, we see various sections of a dusty, blue 1950s bus with thephrase “ALLAHA EMANET” [Trust in God] stenciled under the outside of thewindshield. Cuts to the interior of the bus introduce ten black-haired men in variousstates of half-sleep, each in semi-formal traveling clothes. Driving the bus is the group’schatty bon-vivant chaperone, a German Turkish guest worker singing a well-knownAnatolian rock tune by Barı$ Manço, ostensibly to pacify the anxieties of his speechless,forlorn passengers. Upon arriving at the unidentified north European metropolis wherethey expect to be assigned a worksite, the driver collects a pile of Turkish lira from eachprospective worker, and then further advises that they hand over their passports and extracash so he can register them at the local police station. “That’s the custom here!” heclarifies. After instructing the men to stay in the bus until he returns, the driver walksthrough downtown Stockholm and boards a Lufthansa flight to Hamburg with his newlyacquired fortune. Before boarding the plane, he tosses the pile of passports in an airportwastebin.Now penniless, stateless, and speechless in this undisclosed location, the hoodwinkedwould-be guest workers have no idea what country they are in, as their chaperone makeshis way back to Hamburg to cash in. It is only after 25 minutes into the film that the busboundTurks begin to speak with one another, conjecturing about where the driver hasgone. Fearing discovery, they draw the bus-window curtains, not daring to step out onto44 That 80% of the film dialogue in Turkish or Swedish is another complicating factor, though its tendencytoward silent-film conventions invites cross-lingual viewership.169

Stockholm’s Straerter Tor, a striated space of urban renewal, affectionately and derisivelynicknamed “the Slab” [Platten]. The first time the Slab is shown, it is introduced with asweeping 90-degree pan and a rush of cymbals. In an admixture of vaudevillian and noirstylizations, the remainder of the film depicts the efforts of the bus-inhabitants to subsistin their precarious new place of residence.So what makes this film more than just one more depiction of hapless guest-workersvictimized “between two worlds”? After all, with the interventions of Walraff, Berger,and the filmmaker Hark Bohm, the period from 1975 to 1988 was the heyday of guestworkerrealism. 45 Yet already in 1977, Okan’s Otobüs is recasting tragedy as farce withextreme lighting, expressionistic stagings and gestural excess that undermines thecontemporaneous political topicality of Turks in Germany. 46 Through a rhetoric of excess,the film calls attention to the process of iconization that would produce the guest-workermotif. Rather than jettisoning the guest worker itself in favor of a more differentiatedrepresentational project, this film instead floods the icon with all the resources ofexpressionist cinema.This bearing first becomes clear as the chaperone/driver gathers the men together fora group portrait while en route to their new workplace. With the “latest American model”camera, the Turkish guest worker in Germany takes a medium-long shot of his charges,directing them “not to fidget while I take the picture.” [“Kıpırdamayın, çekiyorum.”] Theresulting image cites the battery of photographs included in John Berger’s The SeventhMan, of the previous year. This scene of being photographed, of being memorialized as45 Yasemin. Dir. Hark Bohm. Hamburger Kino-Kompanie, 1988.46 Göktürk et al. 2007, 339–342.170

part of a recognizable multitude, forecasts the rancorous contentions that would structurethe debate on Turkish German representation for the next two decades. Yet as the filmnarrative “progresses,” the figures framed in the driver’s portrait turn the tables on thiseconomy of the gaze, inspecting Europe from behind the curtains of their abandoned bus.(Simultaneously, now back in Germany, the Turkish German bus driver feignsspeechlessness at the Hamburg airport customs inspection counter, once again citing theiconic Turk of journalistic exposés of the time.)After enduring the cold for several hours, a few of the passengers decide to sneak outinto the dark square to look for water. As a couple fornicates loudly in a nearby telephonebooth, the contraband Turks sneak back and forth from the bus to the bathroom, in groupsof two and three. Lighting, physical comedy, and extreme close-ups make theperformances truly vaudevillian, as the figures cite Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton’sapoplectic encounters with the modern metropolis, here in the form of Stockholm’sdeserted shopping district.Emboldened by the empty cityscape, the men begin to quietly survey the spoils ofdowntown Stockholm’s storefronts. Scanning the manikins, knick-knacks, and gadgets,they window-shop their way around the deserted pedestrian thoroughfares. On thefollowing afternoon, the Straeter Tor fills with a new set of cultural oddities, which themen take in from behind the curtains of their bus. They observe a middle-aged womansinging and playing “How Great Thou Art” on a portable organ amid a crowd ofunmoved bystanders, they watch a crowd of drunken revelers wrestle each other to theground. They gaze at a row of rotisserie chickens, a police officer directing a band, awoman purchasing a vacation package to Spain at a travel agency. A jump-cut shows171

their busdriver in Hamburg, shopping for a prostitute. In this montage, it is thecommunity of Turkish men who, from their perch in the epicenter of postmodernEuropean urban planning, attempt to decode the inscrutable leisure rituals of the NorthEuropean bourgeoisie.On a formal level, this series of montages in Otobüs once again enacts Morton’sconcept of “sideshadowing,” here also in an adversely multilingual context. Because themen in the bus cannot understand the language of those they observe, and because themen are spatially isolated, the narrative may only proceed laterally, from one scene ofpotential, deferred contact to the next. As the Swedish-language exchange between thetravel agent and her Spain-bound customer unfolds, the inexplicable bus hulks quietly inthe background like an unnoticed bystander. This mise-en-scene of spatial segregationand linguistic incommensurability is recapitulated when the men, who have found theirway into a subway station, are surrounded by a group of Swedish revelers on their wayback from a masquerade ball. Intending to frighten the men, the natives put their masksand accessories back on, surround the men, and dance in a circle around them—howlingall the while. This scene is a gruesome reillustration of what has come to be known as“intercultural dialogue”: as the natives don exotic masks, the foreigners shrink back indefensive poses.Lost in Stockholm’s shopping district, one of the men calls out (in Turkish) to asolitary dog-walker: “Brother, have you seen the bus, the bus!” [“Otobüsü gördün mü,karde#, otobüsü?”] Flustered upon being hailed in this way, the man picks up hisminiature dog from the sidewalk and sets off quickly in the opposite direction. Here, theTurkish-speaking man attempts to call the Swedish passerby’s attention to the most172

crucial icon of his current situation: the bus. Neither identity, heritage, nor homeland areon the tip of his tongue, but rather the strange vehicle of his current predicament.Naturally, this entreaty falls on allolingual ears, and the two strangers’ paths divergeagain without consequence.This bus has been the frame through which he has perceived the city. Nonetheless thetwo policemen patrolling the square have only this to say about it:This vehicle is still here.Strange, what do we do?It’s as if no one has been here.The film concludes with the destruction of the bus. As the vehicle is eventually towed topolice headquarters, the front door is broken open, and the men are dragged out one byone, the camera cuts each time to a shot of the bus being smashed. This set of cuts is themost jarring sequence of the film; as the men are brought into state custody, their(im)mobile observatory and former mode of transit is smashed to shards of glass andmetal.Comical and defamiliarizing in an era hungry for realist depictions, Tunç Okan’sOtobüs registered a minority opinion on the scope and bearing of Turkish-Europeanmigration narrative. Like the 1988 guest worker comedy Polizei (dir. -erif Gören), itsmultilingual script and performances further diminished its potential for uptake amid therise of multicultural doctrine in 1980s West Germany.173

A (Not Only) German Literature 47That Germany as a linguistic community or space of integration played next to noguiding role in the politics of early guest-worker literature may provide some indicationabout its awkward position, not only in German literature overall, but in the “literature ofmigration” canon as well. Whereas the multilingual guest-worker literature of the 1970shad generally been predicated, in the absence of a large German-language readership, onlabor rights and the collective position of labor migrants, the literature of migrationduring the Kohl era was propelled by growing public receptivity on the political Center-Left to narratives about ethnic background, cultural difference, homelands, religiousidentity, integration, and individualistic liberalism. The moniker “guest-worker literature”eventually came to be regarded as a literary-historical period to be transcended at allcosts, in favor of an engagement with literariness and intercultural understanding in anexclusively German-language context.The shift from a labor-based to a culture-based bearing in the field of Turkish Germanliterature began to take hold around 1982 amid two contemporaneous political acts ofrecognition from German institutions: 1) a growing consciousness and parliamentarycommitment to foreigners’ rights at the highest level of the federal government, and 2)scholarly initiatives to recognize immigrants’ German-language literary competencethrough prizes and competitions. Where writers’ efforts in the 1970s had generally beenfocused on expanding political expression through poetic (and journalistic) means in anylanguage, the 1980s discourse focused on commending stylistic achievement in German47 This subtitle refers to one of the early multicultural anthologies designed by German-as-a-Foreign-Language pedagogues, marking a shift from labor internationalism to cultural integration. Ackermannand Harald Weinrich 1986.174

as a foreign language, as academic institutions began to respond to the multicultural civicimperatives of the late 1970s. Harald Weinrich, the founder of the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize for second-language writers of German, described the provenance of thisnew impulse in 1986 as follows:The creation of the Adelbert von Chamisso Award for authors with nativelanguages other than German should be a signal that this literature, coming from theoutside, is welcome among us Germans and that we can appreciate it as anenrichment of our own literature as well as a concrete piece of world literature. Andeven if we sometimes are not sure how to address these half-foreigner, half-nativeauthors who often do not have a German passport but do have a German pen, weare momentarily absolved of our linguistic confusion when we name them“Chamisso’s grandchildren.” 48That the namesake of this prize, Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot, was a Frencharistocrat driven into exile as a youth by the French Revolution begins to suggest theirony of the ascription “Chamisso’s grandchildren” to writers who had first entered WestGermany alongside millions of labor migrants. This break with “guest-worker literature”entailed a number of concomitant shifts: 1) a reinvestment in the singular author as theprimary locus of enunciation, as opposed to literary collectives, translationcollaborations, and anthologies; 2) a prohibitive investment in German as the preferredlanguage of literary expression (with the important exceptions of Güney Dal and ArasÖren) 3) a strengthened recourse to host-country or heritage “culture” as the propertheme of migrant writing (as opposed to labor and civil rights), and 4) a de-preferencingof spatial motifs that might reiterate stereotypical guest-worker milieus: imprisonment,dystopia, claustrophobia, etc. Such syndromes of claustrophobia, which shaped the48 Göktürk et al. 2007, 390–391.175

narrative world of Tevfik Ba$er’s 1986 film Forty Square Meters of Germany to SinanÇetin’s 1993 film Berlin in Berlin, met with decreasing resonance in the pan-ethnicKanak critiques of the 1990s, which prized a rhetoric of ubiquity (“We are everywhere!”[“Wir sind überall!”].Through the annual event of the Chamisso Prize, this German-as-a-foreign-languagetradition of (monolingual) literary competence gradually gained the rhetorical upper-handin discussions about the cultural integration of Turks in German society. The eloquenceof Turkish German authors in the German language became a touchstone for publicdiscourse about the “integratability” of all Turks, whether or not they were interested inGerman literature at all. This spirit of language super-mastery as a kind of immigrantcoup d’esprit emerged poignantly in Sten Nadolny’s 1990 epic novel Selim, oder dieGabe der Rede [Selim, or the Gift of Speech] and lives on in the cabaret performances ofFatih Çevikkoglu and Django Asül, who dazzle their German audiences withhyperauthentic Colognish and Bavarian dialects respectively. (Çevikkollu regularly refersto his Cologne dialect as a means for demonstrating his unimpeachable Germanness incontrast to ethnic Germans who hesitate to use their dialects in mixed company.)Hypotextual ExperimentsThe inchoate, multiple-language context of the 1970s yielded to the single-language“cosmo-polite fictions” of the 1980s. With this term, Tom Cheesman refers to thediscursive tension between political euphemization and transnational lifeworlds inTurkish German prose narrative. 49 This relationship could be usefully described as one of49 Cheesman 2007, 15.176

hypertext and hypotext: of a set of published narratives that emulate the shared traffic instories, letters, heritage-language newsletters and leaflets, and personal notations whichwere exchanged below the threshold of publishability from 1959 to approximately 1980.A recent controversy between two renowned German authors of Turkish descentindicates how this imagined and authoritative corpus of source-narrative based in theinstitutions and milieus of the “guest-worker program” still holds sway in how migrationliterature is composed and interpreted. The scandal between Feridun Zaimoglu andEmine Sevgi Özdamar hinged upon the authors’ alleged propriety over the narrativecontent of a set of audio-cassettes dictated in Turkish by Zaimoglu’s mother, a formerguest-worker herself. Both a narrative resource and a critical albatross, such documentsof the guest-worker period form a multilingual hypotext that underlies the production andreception of Turkish German literature today.Though this relationship between text and hypotext is evident as early as Ören’sNiyazi—the last lines of which reproduce fragments of letters in broken German—otherlater authors followed suit. Noteworthy exemplars are Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Karagözin Alamania” [Blackeye in Germany], a stylized rendering of the letters of an unnamedguest worker. Feridun Zaimoglu took this genre of text/hypotext adaptation a step furtherwith his mock ethnographies and mock interviews in Kanak Sprak and Kopp und Kragen,where Zaimoglu steps into the role of spokesperson for multiple Kanaken, whoselanguage is implicitly in need of normalization in order to be publishable. In hisintroductory manifesto to Kanak Sprak, Zaimoglu made his hypotextual venture explicit:Their underground codex developed long ago, they speak a jargon of their own.Kanaki speak, a kind of creole or underworld argot with secret codes and signs.Their speech is related to the freestyle sermon of the rappers; like them, they adopt177

a pose to express themselves. This language decides their existence: it is a whollyprivate performance in words. The verbal power of the Kanakis expresses itself in aforceful, breathless, nonstop hybrid stammering, marked with random pauses andturn of phrase invented on the spot. The Kanaki’s command of his mother tongueis imperfect, and his grasp of “Allemannish” is no less limited. His vocabulary iscomposed of “gibberish” words and phrases known to neither language. Into hisimprovised metaphors and parables he weaves borrowings from high Turkish andfrom the dialectal slang of Anatolian villages. 50As with Franz Kafka’s stance as cultural mediator between the Yiddish theater and theGerman-Jewish intellectuals of the Bar Kochba in 1912, or Levi speaking on behalf of aninmate whose language would not be understood beyond the threshold of Birkenau,Zaimoglu both presents Kanak Sprak to the reader and simultaneously indicates itsrecalcitrance, its incommensurability with the dominant literary language. Instead ofexpanding the signifying capacity of German, Kanak Sprak insists on an aesthetics ofconstraint, of rendering the voluble heteroglossia of Kanak speech comprehensible bytranslating it into a (somewhat impolite) “polite fiction.” Zaimoglu’s later work,especially in the 2006 Leyla, abandons this stylistics of recalcitrant multilingualism infavor of the “deictic presence” of testimonial realism.50 Feridun Zaimoglu. “Preface to Kanaki Speak.” Trans. Tom Cheesman. Göktürk et al. 2007, 407.178

Interesting Stuff Came From ForeignersO you who sell outlandish words wrapped inpoetry!A book of odes is not a copy of the dictionary—Nabi (1630–1712) 51Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s novel Life is Caravanserai has Two Doors I Came In One andWent out the Other (1992) bears the volatile distinction of having been the platform fortwo entirely unrelated, high-profile literary scandals over the course of 15 years. Evenbefore the novel was published in its entirety, some commentators interpreted Özdamar’s1991 win at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for Literature competition in Klagenfurt,Austria as the straw that broke German literary competence. Whereas the Chamisso prizewas reserved for non-native writers, the Bachmann Prize had been awarded annuallysince 1977 for an individual author’s excellence in German literature, regardless of howor when they learned German.Jens Jessen, a literary columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung describedCaravanserai asthe helpless text of a German-writing Turkish woman, which plays with folkloristicelements from the fairy tale tradition of her homeland, and which the jurors goodnaturedlyviewed as surrealism. For this reason, among all the others, the IngeborgBackmann Prize is as good as dead. Only out of the deference befitting an obituaryshall we say the author’s name: Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Against the backdrop ofcontemporary Turkish prose, which is in no way naïve or folkloristic, the choice isabsurd, even insulting. 5251 A. S. Levend. Türk dilinde geli#me ve sadele#me evreleri. Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1972. 78.“Ey $i’r miyanında satan lafz-ı garibi. / Divan-ı gazel nüsha-ı kamus de#üldür.”52 Jens Jessen. “Lockruf der Eitelkeit.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2 Jul. 1991.179

In a like-minded diatribe entitled, “Why Don't the Germans Love to Read Their OwnNew Writers?” Arno Widmann described Caravanserai as a “grammarless flood ofOriental images.” 53 Such vitriol, however, competed with other headlines announcinghow “Interesting Stuff Came from Foreigners” and “Immigrants are Breathing Life intoGerman Literature.” 54 In the ensuing months, these two historically laden encampmentsturned into full-fledged discourses in their own right, with Caravanserai as a kind ofaccidental touchstone.Just as the newly awarded Bachmann Prize was being lauded and bemoaned in thepress, a concurrent literary-historical event was taking place in Berlin. The promotionalmaterial for a year-long series of readings and events called Türkei literarisch [TurkeyLiterarily] described its corrective aim as follows:Modern Turkish literature is still one of the least known among European literatureshere. With the exception of Ya%ar Kemal and Nazım Hikmet, a sufficient receptionof Turkish literature is still to come in Germany. This year, the Literary Colloquiumpresents a series of the most important authors from Turkey. The spectrum rangesfrom the great lyric poet Fazıl Hüsnü (b. 1914) to the young theatrical and proseauthor Murathan Mungan (b. 1955), from the novelist Adalet A#ao#lu to theexperimental short-story writer Ferit Edgü. In addition, Turkish authors livingabroad, especially in Germany, will be represented, including those of the youngergeneration who have begun to build a bridge to the language and literature of theirsecond homeland. The beginning of the series evokes the literary city of $stanbul,the intellectual and cultural center of Turkey. The Turkish literature known in53 Arno Widmann. “Why Don’t the Germans Love to Read Their Own New Writers?” The European 28Jan.–3 Feb. 1994. 12–13.54Karen Jankowsky. “‘German’ Literature Contested: The 1991 Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize Debate,‘Cultural Diversity,’ and Emine Sevgi Özdamar.” The German Quarterly 70.3 (1997): 261–276. 266.180

Germany, from a more rural and provincial perspective, will be placed in a new lightby the invited authors from $stanbul. 55The series, which included such lesser unknown authors as Orhan Pamuk and BilgeKarasu, was accompanied by an anthology of the participants’ works translated intoGerman. As a collection, A Sky Belongs to Every Word [Jedem Wort Gehört ein Himmel],sought to complement a German literary engagement with Turkey that “is in generalshaped by a longing for the totally Other. From the sacks of coffee that were left standingat the gates of Vienna to the Döner kebab stands of Berlin stretches an arc of exoticpleasure—enticing but also often unsettling.” 56It is easy to see how these two simultaneous literary-historical events marked both acleft and a convergence in the institutional transmission of German Turkish writing.While Özdmar’s Bachmann Prize valorized the content and composition of onerepresentative immigrant writer’s achievements in German, the concurrent TürkeiLiterarisch—with its painstaking efforts to translate and transmit a range of Turkish andTurkish German authors—sought to undermine precisely the monolingualist exclusionsat the heart of the Bachmann award. (A certain irony lies in the fact that Ingeborg55 “Türkei Literarisch.” Berlin: Literarisches Colloquium Berlin e. V. 1991.“Immer noch ist die modernetürkische Literatur eine der hierzulande unbekannten europäischen Literaturen. Abgesehen von Ya$arKemal und Nazım Hikmet steht eine befriedigende Rezeption türkischer Literatur in Deutschland nochaus. Das Literarische Colloquium stellt in diesem Jahr eine Reihe mit den wichtigsten Autorinnen undAutoren der Türkei vor. Das Spektrum reicht vom großen Lyriker Fazıl Hüznü Da#larca (geb. 1914) biszum jungen Theater- und Prosaautor Murathan Mungan (geb. 1955), von der RomanschriftstellerinAdalet A#ao#lu bis zum experimentellen Erzähler Ferit Edgü. Auch türkische Autoren, die im Ausland,vor allem in Deutschland leben, werden vertreten sein, vor allem solche der jüngeren Generation, diebegonnen hat, zur Sprache und Literatur ihrer zweiten Heimat eine Brücke zu bauen. Der Auftakt derReihe steht im Zeichen der Literaturstadt !stanbul. Die in Deutschland eher aus ländlich-provinziellenPerspektive bekannte Literatur wird durch die eingeladenen !stanbuler Autoren in ein neues Lichtgerückt.”56 Deniz Göktürk and Zafer -enocak. Jedem Wort gehört ein Himmel. Berlin: Babel, 1991. 7. “Von denKaffeesäcken, die die flüchtenden Osmanen vor den Toren Wiens stehen ließen, bis hin zu den Kebap-Buden in Berlin spannt ein Bogen der exotischen Genüsse—verlockend, doch zugleich oft unheimlich.”181

Bachmann herself exceeded in stridently multilingual writing, especially in her 1972short story “Simultan.” [“Simultaneous Interpreter”].)Still largely untranslated in German, the vast majority of contemporary Turkishliterature has a necessarily hypotextual relationship—both to the contemporary Germandiscourses on transnational themes and to German Turkish writing itself. In absence ofextant translations for German readers, it is the (German-writing) Turkish Germanliterary authors who must overwrite this hypotext with legible, and often critical,refigurations.Purloined HypotextsWell, I may venture so far as to say that the papergives its holder a certain power in a certain quarterwhere such power is immensely valuable.—Prefect G., “The Purloined Letter,” Edgar Allen PoeNowhere was this hypotextual dilemma of migration literature more evident than in a2006 plagiarism debate between Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu. Ananonymous Germanist—who later turned out to be named Marianne Brunner—publishedher findings that Zaimoglu had plagiarized motifs from Özdamar’s 1992 Caravanserainovel. The Munich-based researcher alleged a preponderance of overlapping narrativedetail in Zaimoglu’s 2006 novel Leyla—from the Eastern Anatolian setting of Malatya, tothe shaving routines of its female characters, to the phonetically spelled cameoappearances of Hollywood luminaries like Kessrin Hepörn and Humprey Pockart. Thatthe same editor at Cologne’s Kiepenheuer and Witsch publishing house had shepherdedboth novels through the editing process was just one of the infelicitous circumstances182

upon which feuilleton reporters launched a splashy summer exposé just days before theWorld Cup was to open. 57Few witnesses of this plagiarism scandal would care to remember May 2006 as animportant moment in any sort of literary history. “Literary critical argumentation coulddegenerate no further,” claimed one rueful critic, “than this demagogic repartition ofsubjunctive and indicative.” 58 Despair multiplied on a daily basis as journalists implicatedever-new co-conspirators in a duel that had first appeared to involve the two veteranauthors alone. The predominantly male reviewers of Zaimoglu’s novel from only weeksbefore now appeared woefully unreliable, if not disingenuous. The editorial staff atKiepenheuer and Witsch came under suspicion for having negligently overlooked alooming disaster in order to ensure high sales with a novel that features intrafamilialhonor killings, domestic sexual violence, and young Muslim women’s subjectivity—topics that have topped the German pop literary charts since 2005. 59 Zaimoglu waslampooned for lifting motifs from a more skilled literary artist than himself, in order toease his as yet unsuccessful transformation from activist pseudo-ethnographer to literarynovelist.Redoubling the crisis was the fact that both authors were generally regarded as iconicbellwethers in Germany’s literature of Turkish migration, a sub-genre that had beenprone to evaluation on an authenticity scale since Akif Pirinçci’s novels hit the market inthe early and mid-1980s. This painful episode revived obsolescent polemics about57 See for example Elmar Krekeler. “Tante tratschen: Deutscher Moment.” Die Welt 13 Jun. 2006.58 Norbert Mecklenburg. “Ein türkischer Literaturskandal in Deutschland” in literaturkritik 7 (July 2006).59 Necla Kelek. Die fremde Braut: ein Bericht aus dem Inneren des türkischen Lebens in Deutschland.Munich: Goldmann, 2006. Seyran Ate$. Grosse Reise ins Feuer: die Geschichte einer deutschen Türkin.Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag. 2006.183

authenticity, identity, and sociological realism—not to mention Orientalism. In order tohead off the threat of a collective conceptual recidivism along these lines, most partieshoped the story would fall from public view after a few news cycles. 60 The KiWipublishing house quashed the threat of a long and public legal struggle by way of aprivate arbitration.But the affair signals an important moment for the literature of migration in Germany,not because of the veracity of any of its contentions, but because of the unique structureof the discourse and the presumptions about authorship and originality that it brings tolight. The very public interplay of each of these factors during the plagiarism scandalcalled productive attention to the question “what creates the authority with which authorsauthorize.” 61Zaimoglu claimed that the similarities between his novel and Özdamar’s ought to beseen as the norm, rather than the exception, in the overall itinerary of literary influence.“Take a look at post-War German literature. In the 1960s and 1970s, novels are chockfull of Nazi fathers who are more than just somewhat similar to one another.” 62Zaimoglu’s retort insists that borrowing or sharing motifs is a norm of the literary field,and that migration literature bears no special forensic burden to prove uniqueness. HereZaimoglu seems to second Bourdieu’s attempt to demystifythe ideology of creation, which makes the author the first and last source of thevalue of his work, [and] conceals the fact that the cultural businessman (art dealer,publisher, etc.) is at one and the same time the person who exploits the labour of60 Mecklenburg 2006.61 Pierre Bourdieu. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia, 1993. 76.62 Feridun Zaimoglu. “Faule Aprikosen aus Malatya.” Netzeitung.de 14 Jun. 2006. “Sehen Sie sich dochmal die deutsche Nachkriegsliteratur an. In den sechziger und siebziger Jahren sind die Romane vollerNazi-Väter, die sich teilweise mehr als nur ähnlich sind.”184

the “creator” by trading in the “sacred” and the person who, by putting it on themarket, by exhibiting, publishing or staging it, consecrates a product which he has“discovered” and which would otherwise remain a mere natural resource. 63For some, the way this affair pulled apart domains of authorial subjectivity, which hadheretofore been protected under the cloak of literary craft, was both refreshing andsobering. Phrases themselves—languages (native and foreign), figures, and discursivelayering—were, for the moment, as sovereign as the individual authors and theiremblematic success in the market.Özdamar, in turn, was baffled by the charge that she was the one who had “stolen”narratives from Zaimoglu’s aunt decades before, when the two women were living at aguest worker dormitory on Berlin’s Stresemann Street in the 1960s. 64 Even Zaimoglu’smother Güler Zaimoglu played a prominent role in the debacle as her son’sauthenticating, Turkish-speaking alibi. The forensic frenzy left no one, including thenovel’s readers, uninjured. One observer, Zafer -enocak, commented that “The questionwhether one author copied from another is unimportant. But the fact that a journalistinvestigating such a question rings up the protagonist of a novel, indeed must do so, inorder to confirm her authenticity—that is disturbing.” 65What the affair indicates for migration literature—irrespective of the discourse ofauthenticity—is how a multilingual corpus of hypotext from the guestworker period(Güler Zaimoglu’s cassettes, stories shared at guestworker dormitories, letters,notebooks) continues to fertilize the ground of Turkish German literary fiction and its63 Bourdieu 1993, 76.64 Mecklenburg 200665 Cited in Cheesman 2007, 191.185

eception. Unfit for publication in its occasional, multilingual, and personal form, thishypotext nonetheless harbors accounts of historical circumstances that are documented inno other format. Like Holocaust memoir, collective belief in such a hypotextual corpus ororal history archive fuels both a wide variety of textual rituals of retrieval and emulation,and a tradition of contestation about the veracity of their sources.An Inn with Two DoorsThe way Özdamar’s text was revisited in 2006 as an allegedly purloined hypotext forZaimoglu’s novel offers us an opportunity to differentiate between modes of multilingualrepresentation in the novel, a topic that escaped attention in the press debate. WhereasZaimoglu’s novel Leyla adheres to the testimonial realism prevalent in suchprogrammatic texts as Necla Kelek’s The Foreign Bride (2006) and Seyran Ate$’ GreatJourney into the Fire (2003), Özdamar’s text strains against this genre of what Arendtmight have called “assimilated recollection,” making it an odd sourcetext for Zaimoglu’sfigurations in Leyla. 66Over the fifteen years between the publication of the two novels, Caravanserai hasbecome a staple for Anglo-American syllabi on Turkish German writing, and for anykind of literary history on migration to Germany. For Azade Seyhan, the text was aboutnothing less than “language in all its forms and manifestations, as speech and script, aslanguage game and everyday practice, as ritual and performance, and as survival andmastery” as well as being a “palimpsest of erased, occluded, forgotten, and rememberedsignifying practices such as homilies, litanies, ancient curses, and modern political66 Arendt 1947.186

promises.” 67 David Horrocks added his understanding of the novel as “blowing a greatraspberry in the face of all official versions of history and all those who have wieldedpower in the past.” 68 For Shiela Johnson, the text “gives voice to the economically,culturally and politically weak or suppressed, such as women and/or the mentally ill.” 69Since then, Caravanserai has been a fulcrum for debates about German Studies,multiculturalism, minor literatures, deterritorialization, and hybridity.Some researchers left the realm of culture and Orientalism behind in order to advancetheses about the text’s stakes in translingualism and translatability. Sohelia Ghassydiscusses the dual operation of language creolization and threshold-crossing inCaravanserai as a means to “leave behind the Vaterland,” with its patriarchal logics andimagery. 70 Seyhan further describes how the narrative voice decouples linguistic signsfrom their first-order significations, attaching themselves to “another not-so-transparentsignifying system.” 71 Such stances hearken back to Chiellino’s appeal from the early1980s to locatea language within the German language that in its essential qualities could not beused against what is foreign, that no longer makes foreigners sacrifice or even betraythe content of their work, a language that is open enough to accept foreign contentitself. 7267 Azade Seyhan. “Lost in Translation: Re-Membering the Mother Tongue in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's DasLeben ist eine Karawanserei.” The German Quarterly 69.4 (1996): 414–426. 420.68 David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky, eds. Turkish Culture in German Society Today. Providence:Berghahn, 1996. 1469 Johnson 2001, 2170 Ghaussy 1999.71 Seyhan 1996, 424.72 Gino Chiellino. Fremde: a Discourse of the Foreign. Trans. Louise von Flotow Toronto: Guernica, 1995.34–35.187

Yet such a search for a German language—and particularly for a German literarylanguage—which is itself open to foreign content, underestimates the social durability ofmonolingualism in this context. Even Caravanserai, with its rough-shod translations ofTurkish idioms and cameo appearances of Turkish and transliterated Arabic phrases,remains a fundamentally monolingual(ist) text—a linguistically “polite” fiction. Attunedto the fact that using untranslated words would be prohibitive for a German readershipwhose knowledge of Turkish is statistically insignificant, Özdamar always providesparenthetical translations of Turkish phrases, and only rarely includes complete,grammatically complex segments of non-German text. In a sense, it is thus anoverstatement to claim hybridity and creolization as the principle compositional modes inthe text. In what follows, I will suggest how Caravanserai appropriates the resources ofmonolingualism to demonstrate its own frailties in presenting the dynamic hypotextualtraffic of multilingual lifeworlds.Though Caravanserai is almost invariably read as an autobiographical text, there isstrong case to be made that it is—to reiterate a distinction suggested in Chapter One inthe context of Kafka criticism—rather a linguagraphical meditation, depicting theemergence and evanescence of language(s) in the process of subjectivation. Whereas herfirst collection of short stories, Mother Tongue [Mutterzunge] had declared in overt termsthe relationship between a narrator and “her” language, Caravanserai engages in a morespeculative mode of figuration. Compare, for instance, the opening claims of both texts,first from “Mother Tongue”:188

In my language, tongue means: language. The tongue has no bones, wherever onetwists it, it turns in that direction. I sat with my twisted tongue in this city of Berlin.[…] If only I knew when I lost my mother tongue. 73And from Caravanserai:First I saw the soldiers. I stood there in the belly of my mother between the bars ofice, I tried to hold on and grabbed the ice and fell and landed in the same spot.Knocked on the wall, no one heard. 74While Mother Tongue is an explicit meditation on the narrator’s willful retrieval of a lostlanguage, Caravanserai begins with a kind of narrative bilocationality, a Deixis amPhantasma of double “hereness” through which the narrative voice is born. 75 Though thenarrator is “inside” her mother, no one on the other side hears her speech. The speakersees the action outside her mother’s body like a film—with Turkish soldiers attending toa mother, as she travels on the train toward her father’s house to give birth. In the cold,otherworldly womb the narrator finds herself “between the bars of ice”—ironizing suchspatial metaphors of being “between the worlds” mentioned above. That no one outsidethe mother’s womb, including the mother herself, hears the narrator’s speech suggests afounding narrative predicament of language for the text. If we forgo the option of readingthis text autobiographically—as the telling of the first moments of one’s own life—thefantastic spatial split and the narrator’s attempt to reason with the outside world suggestsa different kind of birth is taking place—that of the narrative voice itself, speaking73 Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Mutterzunge. Berlin: Rotbuch 1990. 9. “In meiner Sprache heißt Zunge: Sprache./ Zunge hat keine Knochen, wohin man sie dreht, dreht sie sich dorthin. / Ich saß mit meiner gedrehtenZunge in dieser Stadt Berlin. […] Wenn ich nur wüßte, wann ich meine Mutterzunge verloren habe.”74 Özdamar 1992, 9. “Erst habe ich die Soldaten gesehen, ich stand da im Bauch meiner Mutter zwischenden Eisstangen, ich wollte mich festhalten und faßte an das Eis und rutschte und landete auf demselbenPlatz, klopfte an die Wand, keiner hörte.”75 Bühler 1965.189

German, yet enveloped on all sides by “Muttersätze” [mother sentences] in Turkish. Yetin describing a distinction between Özdamar’s Caravanserai and the later novel TheBridge of the Golden Horn, Elizabeth Boa claims:Both novels are narrated in German, but Karawanserei has a monolingual Turkishprotagonist whereas in the second novel the initially Turkish-speaking protagonistlearns German. In the first novel, then, the linguistic divide runs between narratorand protagonist, whereas in the second there is a convergence. 76I would argue that there can be no such linguistic divide between narrator andprotagonist; the narrative voice is necessarily multilingual, in constant transit betweenGerman and Turkish. The following section gives a potent example of this recursivenarrative procedure between memory and enunciation across languages.A Secret Language Fills the SoulThough brief, Göktürk’s 1994 essay on “Multicultural Tonguetwisters” remains the mostprescient and compelling language-oriented intervention into Özdamar criticism.Forgoing a thematic reading of Caravanserai, Göktürk points out that the novel’s “literal,not particularly successful translations” of Koran and Turkish lyric verse index not an“aesthetics of deficiency” but a deliberate stylistic innovation that foregrounds theauthor’s claim that “Mistakes are my identity. Five million people who live here speak inmistakes. It is a new language.” 77 Göktürk adds that “It is not only Turks that write falseGerman, in the meantime German literaturks are doing so as well. […] Time will tell howfar they will reach into literature.”76 Elizabeth Boa. ¨Ozdamar’s Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity And Literary Form.”German Life And Letters 59.4 (2006): 526–539. 526.77 Deniz Göktürk. “Multikulturelle Zungenbrecher: Literatürken aus Deutschlands Nischen.” Sirene.Zeitschrift für Literatur 12–13 (1994): 77–93. 81.190

Göktürk praises the novel’s contribution to “a humorously liberated stance vis-à-visprocesses of cultural mixing” that breaks the cycle of “moaning and commiserationfostered amid the consoling warmth of multicultural niches.” 78 Nonetheless her essayshares an overt reticence about the novel with other early critics like Zafer -enocak, whosaw in it a potential alibi for a new streak of Orientalism in German public andintellectual discourse about Turkey. For Göktürk this ambivalence lay not only inCaravanserai’s emulation of (debatably) childlike oral narrative, but in the Germanlanguagepublishing industry’s inveterate lack of curiosity about modern Turkishliterature. (In subsequent essays, Göktürk reconsidered this reticence, discovering in thetext a potent and comical canvas for staging the narratability of Turkish themes forcontemporary German audiences. 79 )Until the rise to prominence of such Turkish writers as Orhan Pamuk, the languidpace of literary translations out of Turkish into German contrasted starkly with theaccelerated program of translating European belles-lettres for use in Turkish primary andsecondary schools under Education Minister Hasan Ali Yücel, an event that Özdamarcomically documents in her novel: “Then a little fat man came into the school, an actor.The school had a stage. He said, ‘Atatürk and his Culture Minister Hasan Ali Yücel hadall the world’s classics translated into Turkish for you.’” 80This acute unidirectionality of translation leads Göktürk to question Özdamar’sawkward impromptu rendering of, for instance, an Ahmet Ha$im poem “The Staircase”78 Göktürk 1994, 89.79 Deniz Göktürk. “Kennzeichen: weiblich/türkisch/deutsch. Beruf: Sozialarbeitering/ Schriftstellering/Schauspielerin.” Frauen Literatur Geschichte. Eds. Hiltrud Gnüg and Renate Möhrmann. Stuttgart:Metzler, 1999. 514–532.80 Özdamar 1992, 269.191

[Merdiven], instead of drawing on the already extant and elegant literary translation byAnnemarie Schimmel. 81 “One might have hoped for a more careful philologicalengagement with literary sources,” writes Göktürk.At second glance, the narrator of Caravanserai herself seconds Göktürk’sdiscomfiture about how she renders Ha$im’s beautiful and tender poem: “I read it in a bigroom in front of many people. I read, but it sounded like a limping song. Backstage, I sawmy schoolblouse—the hem hanging down in the back.” 82 A seeming non-sequitor followsthis detail, as the narrator turns to thoughts of her literature teacher, who encouraged herto read stories in class.Is this a scene of shame and self-consolation? The patent difficulty in translating thepoem from (late Ottoman) Turkish into contemporary German has long been the object ofsustained study. 83 While Göktürk suggests Özdamar might have effectively preemptedcharges of naïve exoticism by, for instance, taking advantage of the cumulative resourcesof German philology and Turkology in coming up with a translation of “The Staircase,”the narrator’s first public reading (at age twelve) seems to index a rich translingualdilemma that restages the “mistakes” that, according to Özdamar, characterize her ownlinguistic identity.The hem of the narrator’s school blouse, hanging out in back while she reads thepoem, signals a rebellious or negligent impropriety in how the narrator attends to school81 Ahmet Ha$im. “Die Treppe.” Trans. Annemarie Schimmel. Türkische Gedichte vom 13. Jahrhundert bisin unsere Zeit. !stanbul: Milli E#itim Ba$ımevi, 1973. 142.82 Özdamar 1992, 268.83 Ak$it Göktürk. “Probleme der Übersetzbarkeit dargestellt am Beispiel von Ahmet Ha$im’s Gedicht“Merdiven” und seiner Übersetzung von Annemarie Schimmel.” Der Werdegang der modernen Türkei.Ed. Pia Angela Göktürk. !stanbul: Nazım Terzio#lu Matematik Ara$tırma Merkezi Baskı Atöleysi,1983. 132–153.192

norms that may be seen as constitutive of her narrative presence in the novel. (Thenarrator often complains about how her school blouse is too small.) Yet the poem that shereads on stage begins:A#ır a#ır çıkacaksın bumerdivenlerdenEtiklerinde güne% rengi bir yı#ınyaprakHeavily, heavily, you will climbthe stairsA bundle of sun-colored leavesat your hemSchimmel’s translation readsLangsam, ganz langsam wirst du diese Treppe hinaufgehenAn deinem Saume sonnenfarbige BlätterIn contrast, Özdamar’s narrator below misplaces the infinitive verb steigen and transfersthe plural from merdivenler [stairs] into the German Treppen, though the singular wouldbe more idiomatically precise:Langsam, langsam wirst du steigen auf diese TreppenIn deinen Röcken viele Blätter, sonnenfarbig.As the narrator finishes the poem and proceeds backstage, she notices the embarrassingseam of her blouse, which compounds the uneasiness she feels with the “limping song”she has just performed of Ha$im’s lyric. Yet the poem itself begins with such an image:of sun-colored leaves at one’s hem, as she climbs the stairs—dignified, heavy, and slow.Thus the narrator implicitly locates her own equivocal public performances of languagewithin Ha$im’s lyrical tableau, of a woman climbing a staircase toward the eveninghorizon. That the remembrance/translation of Ha$im’s verse is presented in thestereotypical mixed syntax of “guestworker German” establishes an arc between the 12-193

year-old’s reading of the poem, Özdamar’s own writing career and practice, and Turkishlanguage reform.That both performances arose in the course of a “poetry contest” at school mirrors thepromotional, institutional culture of the Adalbert-von-Chamisso-Prize for secondlanguagewriters of German. Remarkable (because absent) in the narrator’s reading ofHa$im’s poem is the second-to-last line of the ten-line poem: “Bu bir lisân-ı hafîdir kiruha dolmakta.” [“This is a secret language that fills the soul.”] Omitting this line fromher written recollection performs yet again the secrecy of this new language of errors that“fills the soul.”It is directly after this scene of reading—a few non-sequitors later—that the little fatman arrives to the school to deliver the Kemalist government’s translations of worldclassics, including Moliere’sè The Imaginary Invalid, in which Özdamar’s young narratorplays Beline, the conniving wife of an inconsolable hypochondriac. This abruptjuxtaposition between the narrator’s two performances—Ha$im’s ascending figure andMolière’s fretful and sanguine Beline—offers a comic and subtle index of the tensionbetween Ottoman literary modernism and midcentury Kemalism’s emphasis on importedWestern classics. (During the same period the Milli E#ıtim Bakanlı#ı Yayınları alsopublished a series of transcriptions of Ottoman and Turkish classics, which had beenheretofore unavailable to a generation of readers that had grown up reading Latin script.)Ha$im’s second book of poetry &'()* Piyale [The Goblet], in which the poem “TheStaircase” was published in 1926, would be one of the last books of poetry to be printedin the Arabo-Persian script of the Ottoman Empire before the “catastrophically194

successful” switch to a modified Latin alphabet in 1928. 84 Meanwhile Özdamar’sselection of The Imaginary Invalid as her narrator’s first theatrical role parodies the WestEuropean perception of Ottoman society as the perpetual “sick man of Europe.” Aboutthe process of language reform in Turkey, Ha$im wrote:For the last three days, while I write, I watch curiously the grappling of alien wordswith the new letters on the white page. These words written with letters, the outletsof which were the nose and the throat, cannot find their sounds on the keyboard ofthe new alphabet to make themselves heard. In a sentence, these words sound likethe muffled, ugly screams of people who have lost their voices. 85The narrator in Caravanserai embeds Ha$im’s confrontation with language change andlanguage loss in her own performance of reading, the struggle to maintain a language thathas been either taken away, or a language one has had to renounce. In this she calls forththe history of rapid, long-term, and strategic language reengineering since the early 19 thcentury in Turkey which knows no equivalent in post 18 th century Germany. In the 1860s,the co-founder of the Hürriyet newspaper Ziya Pasha would write:Today, when decrees and orders are read out in the hearing of the common people,can anything be made of them? Are such compositions meant exclusively for thosewith a mastery of the written word, or is it intended that ordinary people shouldunderstand what the State commands? Try talking to any commoner in Anatolia andRumelia about a commercial regulation, or the decrees and orders relating to theauctioning and awarding of the right to collect tithes, or establishing the amount oftax due from each household, or any matter at all; you will find that none of thepoor creatures knows nothing about any one of them. 8684 Geo!rey Lewis. The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford/New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999.85 Ahmet Ha$im. “Lisan !marı.” "kdam 3 Dec. 1928. Also cited in Nergis Ertürk. “Modernity and its FallenLanguages. Tanpınar’s Hazret, Benjamin’s Melancholy.” PMLA (2008): 41–56. 49.86 Cited in Lewis 1999. 79. “Elyevm resmen ilan lunan fermanlar ve emirnameler ahad-ı nas huzurundaokutuldukta bir $ey istifade ediliyor mu? Ya bu muharrerat yalnız kitabette melekesi olanlara mı195

As late as 1900, Gibb would note of the baffling multilingual flexibility and figuralpotential of Ottoman literary language:It is not too much to say that during the whole of the five and a half centuries [14 thto mid-19th] every Persian and Arabic word was a possible Ottoman word. In thusborrowing material from the two classical languages a writer was quite unrestrictedsave by his own taste and the limit of his knowledge; all that was required was thatin case of need he should give the foreign words a Turkish grammatical form. 87In re-performing Ha$im’s lyric in the context of her own narrative experimentations withGerman, Özdamar proposes a lineage of multilingual writers arcing through Ottomanverse, modern Turkish poetry in the midst of language reform, and Turkish Germanwriting. For her, none of these three positionalities represent a “commitment” to onelanguage to the exclusion of others, but rather an engagement with language as ahistorical resource.Long before A$ık Veysel sang his haunting recordings of “Day and Night,” previoustellings of this parable offered a wellspring of advice for everyday speakers inmultilingual situations. In the Book of the Stranger [Garipname], the 13 th century Muslimmystic A$ık Pasha had written:To know all the staging posts of the roadDo not despise the Turkish and Persian languages.[…] None had regard for the Turkish tongue;Turks won no hearts.Nor did the Turk know these languagesmahsustur? Yoksa avam-ı nas devletin emrini anlamak içün müdür? Anadolu’da ve Rumeli’de ahad-ınastan her $ahsa, devletin bir ticaret nizamı vardır ve a’$arın suret’i müzayede ve ihalesine ve tevzi-ivergiye ve $una buna dair fermanları ve emirnameleri vardır deyü sorulsun, görülür ki biçarelerinbirinden haberi yoktur.” (sic)87 Elias John Wilkinson Gibb. A History of Ottoman Poetry, Vol. 1. London: Luzac, 1900. 8.196

The narrow road, these great staging posts. 88For A$ık Pasha, not only great literary artists but common people may attain trueknowledge by learning many languages—here Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, though thelatter remains the most in need of reinvigoration. Nonetheless, each of these languages isrepresented not by a territorial principle—by the exclusive use of one language in a givenspace—but rather by the figure of the caravanserai [here menzil], through which one mustpass on a continual and indefinite journey. Özdamar’s novel is principally dedicated torefiguring language use in this light.A Literary History of Accessions and SuccessionsB. Venkat Mani brings forth a potent critique of literary historiography in his volume onTurkish-German novels, suggesting that the “random access history” model presented inWellbery et al.’s New History of German Literature is structurally unsuited to grapplewith Turkish German texts that, like Odradek, are made up of “old, torn pieces of threadof the most various kinds and colors, tied on to and snarled up within one another.” 89Perhaps Turkish German literature is more aptly imagined historically as an “inn withtwo doors”—a field of discontinuous accessions and attritions, of institutionalrecognitions and misrecognitions, of tactical euphemizations, and a fluidity betweennational and international media structures that is, after all, dissimilar to those of its nonmigrantcounterparts. Consider for instance the film career of Erden Kiral, whose Berlin-88 Fahir Iz. Eski Türk edebiyatında nazım. Vol. 1. !stanbul: Küçükaydın matbaası, 1967. 584–5. “Çunbilesin cümle yol mezilleri. / Yirmegil sen Türk ü Tacik dillerin […] Türk diiline kimesne bakmaz idi /Türklerin hergiz gönül akınaz idi / Türk dahi bilmez idi bu dilleri / !nce yolı, ol ulu menzilleri.” (sic)89 Kafka, Franz. Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe: Drucke zu Lebzeiten. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994. 282.“Es sieht zunächst aus wie eine flache sternartige Zwirnspule, und tatsächlich scheint es auch mit Zwirnbezogen; allerdings dürften es nur abgerissene, alte, aneinander geknotete, aber auch ineinanderverfitzte Zwirnstücke von verschiedenster Art und Farbe sein.”197

ased filmmaking in the 1980s has had only the most ephemeral interface withmulticulturally oriented histories of contemporary German film since Kiral moved to!stanbul in the 1990s. Or the work of Zafer -enocak, whose Turkish-language novelsGerman Education [Alman Terbiyesi], The Pavilion [Kö#k], and Yolculuk Nereye [AVoyage to Where?] enact and entail a break with the German-language market, in whichhe had published novels and essay collections since the mid-1980s. 90 Even Emine SevgiÖzdamar, who was cited early on as a central figure in contemporary German literature,is beginning to publish texts in Turkish for which no German-language translation is yetin sight. 91 The fact that many such authors have traveled back and forth from onelanguage to another (and to the next) over this thirty year period means that “the Germanliterary scene” may be too modest an aperture through which to account for literaryhistoricalphenomena that we are now often poised to delegate to the sphere ofcosmopolitanism. Given the historical circumstances sketched out in this chapter, theCaravanserai of German Studies will have to honor their complex right of return.The Frankfurt TravelogueShortly before his death in 1933, Ahmet Ha$im left Istanbul on a five day train ride toFrankfurt for a surgical procedure. In his Frankfurt Travelogue [FrankfurtSeyahatnamesi], he describes what awaited him there:We arrived at the goal of my journey, Frankfurt, after midnight at twenty beforetwo. Despite the late hour, the mechanical sounds of trade and industry could beheard from the depths of every quarter; yet how many people would you guess got90 Zafer -enocak. Alman Terbiyesi. !stanbul: Alef, 2007. Yolculuk Nereye? !stanbul: Alef, 2007. Kö#k.!stanbul: Alef, 2008.91 Emine Sevgi Özdamar. “Kendi kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur”: Ece Ayhan’lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlügü,Ece Ayhan’ın mektupları. !stanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2007.198

out of our magnificent express train? Just two. [...] From our first step, weencountered an exhausted Germany. [...] Who are these prematurely bespangledmen with mean visages, fake hunting uniforms of yellow cloth, fake armbands, andfake munitions for an imaginary future campaign? These are Hitler’s soldiers.Looking around, who are these other men, walking around silently in the darknesswearing red neckties? These are the communists, who, since Hitler, are lessfortunate indeed. [...] On the first day, I ran to Goethe’s house. 92Such literary visitations between Germany and Turkey in the early twentieth centuryremain somewhat of a discursive orphan; neither the proper domain of Turkology nor ofcontemporary Turkish-German critique. Yet the literary and socio-historical imbricationof the two societies—during the Second and Third Reichs, as well as during the WestGerman Economic Miracle and the Berlin Republic— is marked more by continuity thanrupture. From Nazım Hikmet and Sabahattin Ali to Günter Grass and Jörg Fauser,German and Turkish writing have been keenly and anxiously aware of one anotherthroughout the twentieth century.92 Ahmet Ha$im. Bize Göre, Gürebahane-i Laklakan, Frankfurt Seyahatnamesi. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlı#ıYayınları, 1981. 176–184. “!nsan, hayatının tatsizlı#ından ve etrafında görüp bıktı#ı $eylerin yorucualeladeli#inden bir müddet kurtulabilmek ümidiyele seyahate çıkar. Bu bakımdan seyahat“Harekuladelikler avı” demektir. […] Seyahatımın hedefi Frankfurt’a gece yarısından sonra ikiye yirmikala vardık; gecikmi$ saate ra#men derinden derine her taraftan makine gürültüleri duyulan ticaret vesanayı $ehrine muhte$em ekspresimizden kaç ki$i indi tahmin edersiniz? Yalnız iki ki$i. […] Ilk adımdabitmi$ bir Almanya ile kar$ıla$mı$tık. [...] Sarı bezden uydurma bir avcı üniforması üzerinde, uydurmabir kayı$, uydurma bir matra ve muhayyel gelecek bir seferin uydurma domatımı ile erken süslenmi$ $ubaya#ı çehreli adamalar kim? Bunlar Hitlerin askerleridir. Etrafa yan bakarak, sessiz ve karanlıkdola$an kırmızı gravatlı gençler kim? Bunlar da Hitlerinden daha hayırlı olmayan komünistlerdir. […]Vardı#ım ilk günü Goethe’nin evine ko$tum.”199

Chapter FourPamuk: Disorienting the CastleA Turkish novelist walks into a German library.My hero is a Turk and therefore no relation ofKafka’s; they are related only in the literary senseof the word.—Orhan Pamuk, “In Kars and Frankfurt” 1[It] was a modern and anonymous building. Inside were the types you always find insuch libraries: housewives, old people with time to kill, unemployed men, one ortwo Turks and Arabs, students giggling over their homework assignments, and allother manner of stalwarts from the ranks of the obese, the lame, the insane, and thementally handicapped. One drooling young man raised his head from his picturebook to stick out his tongue at me. 2Among the motley contents of this modern and anonymous library, the drooling youngman sticks out his tongue, as if to expel the intruding author from the space. That theword dil in Turkish can be translated either as tongue or language redoubles thegrotesque expulsion.Just hours before his death, the poet-hero of Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow, a resident ofone of Western Europe’s premier publishing and finance capitals Frankfurt am Main,made his daily visit to this dystopic interior space: the city’s Central Library. For over adecade, Ka (short for Kerim Alaku$o#lu) had been living as a political exile a few blocksaway on Goethestrasse, supplementing his government asylum stipend with honoraria1 Orhan Pamuk. “In Kars and Frankfurt.” The Nation 17 Nov. 2005.2 Orhan Pamuk. Kar. !stanbul: Ileti$im, 2002. 252. Snow. Trans. Maureen Freely. New York: Knopf, 2004.252. “Ka’nın her sabah gitti#i Frankfurt Belediye Kütüphanesi modern ve kimliksiz bir binaydı. Içeridebu kütüphanelerin tipik ziyaretçileri, ev kadınları, vakit öldüren ihtiyarlar, i$sizler, bir-iki Arapla Türk,okul ödevi yaparken kıkirdayıp gülü$en ö#renciler ve bu yerlerin $a$maz müdavimleri; a$ırı $i$manlar,sakatlar, deliler ve geri zekalılar vardı. A#ızından tükürük sarkan genç biri, baktı#ı resimli kitabınsayfasından kafasını kaldırıp dil çıkardı bana.”200

from poetry readings before local Turkish audiences. On most days he sat in this libraryreading Auden, Coleridge, and Browning. One evening, he left the library as usual,stopped by a green grocer on a side-street off Kaiserstrasse, and was shot in the backthree times. Ka’s body was found on the wet pavement beneath a pink neon K sign. Asthe only “witness” to his death, this illuminated K pulses above the ill-fated transnationalauthor “in bright pink solitary splendor.” 3But Pamuk insists, when pressed, that his Ka has nothing but a “literary” relationshipto Kafka’s landsurveyor in The Castle. To be sure, Ka’s assassination and posthumousbrush with this pulsing pink simulacrum of his would-be literary predecessor K.—at theintersection of two streets named for Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Kaiser Wilhelm I–seems hardly a heartening tableau of world-literary encounter. Why might this silent andiconic letter K preside over Pamuk’s self-described “political novel” Snow, a novel thatinvents and then mourns the untimely death of its hero Ka, a Turkish writer living inGerman exile, a troubled cosmopolitan who derives political influence from the Germanlanguage while refusing to learn it himself?Indeed this unhappy meeting-of-the-signs between K and Ka on the margins of thepublic literary space of Frankfurt—site of the annual international book fair and thecomprehensive national archive of German-language writing—seems all but befitting thebicultural syncretism with which the Nobel Foundation conferred its 2006 Prize forLiterature on Orhan Pamuk. Explaining their decision, the prize committee suggested thatPamuk’s superlativity as a writer lay in having “renewed the art of the novel—by having3 Pamuk 2002, Turkish 253, English 253. “Kül rengi içinde pırıl pırıl bir pembeyle parlayan neon bir Kharfine takılmı$tı.”201

ecourse to two cultures, cultures that are, of course, related but profoundly different, twocultures that he masters with equal excellence.” 4 The grounds for recognizing Pamuk’sgenial craft thus lay in his masterful diplomacy between two whole and isometric“cultures” and his diligence in setting them into productive, imaginative juxtaposition.Yet Snow’s pseudo-documentary realism—its uncanny recursions between the parodicand the mystical, between local fixations and transnational traces—leads the work toresist designation as a twenty-first century parable about Turkish-European relations.What uncanny and disorienting “history of contact” might this novel offer instead?4 Nobel Foundation. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006.” Accessed 15. Aug 2008.http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/index.html.202

Comparatism, Made DifficultHere we come to the East-West question.Journalists are exceedingly fond of the term, butwhen I see the connotations it carries in someparts of the Western press, I’m inclined to thinkthat it would be best not to speak of the East-West question at all. […] There is also a strongsuggestion that the culture, the way of life, and thepolitics of places like the one where I was raisedprovoke tiresome questions, and an expectationthat writers like me exist to offer solutions to thesame tiresome questions.—Orhan Pamuk 5I have a peculiarity that distinguishes me from allmy acquaintances—not essentially, but morestrongly as time goes on. We both knowcharacteristic exemplars of Western Jews. I am, asfar as I know, the most Western-Jewish of them,which means—though I exaggerate a bit here—that no quiet moment is given to me, nothing isgiven to me, everything must be acquired, not justthe present and future, but the past as well.—Franz Kafka, letter to Milena 6With its explicitly bicultural, bicivilizational understanding of Pamuk’s works, the Nobelcommittee seems to have picked up on the figural bearing of his early fictions, wheremirror-images and double-subjects are a poignant metaphorical vehicle. Erika Greber andDeniz Göktürk have shown how Pamuk’s 1985 novel The White Castle introduces adoppelgänger relationship that unsettles the East-West binary upon which an essentialoppositionality between Europe and Turkey is recited. After years living with his5 Pamuk 2005.6 Cited in Giuliano Baioni. Kafka—Literatur und Judentum. Trans. Gertrud Billen and Josef Billen.Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. 4. “Ich habe eine Eigentümlichkeit, die mich von allen mir Bekannten nichtwesentlich, aber graduell sehr stark unterscheidet. Wir kennen doch beide ausgiebig charakteristischeExemplare von Westjuden, ich bin, soviel ich weiß, der westjüdischste von ihnen, das bedeutet,übertrieben ausgedrückt, dass mir keine ruhige Sekunde geschenkt ist, nichts ist mir geschenkt, allesmuss erworben werden, nicht nur die Gegenwart und Zukunft, auch noch die Vergangenheit.”203

Ottoman master Hoca (“Teacher”), a captive Venetian scientist and first-person narratorof The White Castle discovers that he and his captor are in fact the same person—that“We two are one!” 7 This belated recognition of the Self as Other—as the two men standabreast, observing their synchronized movements and identical wounds in the mirror—shows the Venetian that he and his Ottoman adversary have always been in a relationshipof mutual learning and monitoring with one another, despite centuries of bellicosecivilizational one-upmanship. The Venetian is thus made to interrogate how his ownpersonal history of acculturation as a “European” has proceeded via a constant andintimate exchange of concepts and commodities with Turkey. Yet even after their uneasyepiphany on the shores of the Bosporus, the union between the two men remains one ofintimate mutual suspicion, and it becomes increasingly unclear which one of them isactually narrating the novel in the end.Snow, however, distances itself from this contemplative rhetoric of the doppelgänger,giving rise rather to what Nergis Ertürk—in her uneasily comparatistic essay on WalterBenjamin and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar—called the “missed encounters” constitutive ofTurkish-European literary modernity. Thinking through Emily Apter’s work on theuprooting and relocation of German literary comparatism to !stanbul during the Nazi era,Ertürk concludes that:Modern Turkish language and literature have been and are, in an almost absurdlyliteral as well as critical-theoretical sense, a kind of absent presence in this project.[…] Though modern Turkish literature has been and is still generally studied andtaught through the frame of a national canon, what we call national language andliterature was a problem of comparison in (and for) $stanbul long before [Leo]7 Orhan Pamuk. Beyaz Kale. !stanbul: Can Yayınları, 1985. 91. “Ikimiz birimiz.”204

Spitzer and [Erich] Auerbach arrived there. Ottoman and Turkish language andliterature, in other words, have been dealing literally with the problem ofcomparability with Europe at least since the middle of the nineteenth century. 8Here Ertürk makes plain how a series of Westernization endeavors from the Tanzimatperiod (1839–1876) through the alphabet and language “revolutions” [harf ve dildevrimleri] of the late 1920s and 1930s, were part of a state strategy to breach obsoletecultural and literary gaps between modern Turkey and Western Europe. The novel Snow,a late literary-historical heir to this large-scale, Westernizing overhaul of Turkish society,is designed to complicate the notion that “Turkish national literature” is an autonomousdomain that can be evenly compared with its Western European counterparts.As Roberto Schwarz writes in his essay on the importing of the novel to Brazil,‘‘Foreign debt is as inevitable in Brazilian letters as in any other field. It’s not simply aneasily dispensable part of the work in which it appears, but a complex feature of it.” 9 Tothis assertion, Itamar Even-Zohar adds that “There is no symmetry in literaryinterference. A target literature is, more often than not, interfered with by a sourceliterature which completely ignores it.” 10 In shedding the symbology of interculturaldialogue, Snow is a fiction about this discursive traction between “source” and “target”literatures.In a remarkable piece on “Reading Pamuk’s Snow as Parody,” Sibel Erol points outhow:8 Ertürk 2008, 41. Emily Apter. “Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of ComparativeLiterature.” Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Ed. Charles Bernheimer. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 86–96.9 Roberto Schwarz. “The Importing of the Novel to Brazil and Its Contradictions in the Work of RobertoAlencar.” Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Eds. Roberto Schwarz and John Gledson.London: Verso, 1992. 50.10 Itamar Even-Zohar. “Laws of Literary Interference.” Poetics Today 11.1 (1990): 53–72. 62.205

The most notable aspect of Snow is the discrepancy Pamuk creates between theclaims of the characters, who define themselves in one-dimensional extremes andthrough their differences, and the multi-dimensionality of interlinkings andsimilarities created through intertextuality, to which the characters in the novelthemselves are not privy. […] The parody in Snow resides in this sad humour. 11As Erol suggests, the characters in the novel Snow—including Ka—recite and upholdexclusively national personae, despite the transnational affiliations that both undermineand underwrite those identities. Especially among Snow’s bureaucrats, activists, politicalleaders, and artists, any conspicuous bonds to Germany and Western Europe that mightcompromise one’s public image as a devoted Turkish national are comicallysuppressed—and often in vain. In this sense, the novel and its characters perform whatElisa Marti-Lopez describes as the “preoccupation with autochthony.” 12I will argue that Ka is in the kind of double-bind between autochthony andtransgression that awaits anyone who is “commissioned” to give a report aboutcontemporary Turkey. As such, he retraces the footsteps of Kafka’s K. toward the castleof Count Westwest, toward what might be considered, following Spivak, “the semiotic assuch.” On this concept, Spivak writes:Given the rupture between the many languages of Aboriginality and the waves ofmigration and colonial adventure clustered around the Industrial Revolutionnarrative, […] all we have is bilingualism, bilateral arrangements between idiomsunderstood as essentially or historically private, on the one side, and English on theother, understood as the semiotic as such. This is the political violence of translation11 Sibel Erol. “Reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow as Parody: Difference as Sameness.” Comparative CriticalStudies 4 (2007): 403–432. 413.12 Elisa Martí-López. Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-CenturyNovel in Spain. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002.206

as transcoding, of the contemporary translation industry about which many of uswrite. 13Though Spivak is speaking here (in English) about adverse multilingual positionalities asthey results from global English, her conception may well be extended to other sites ofthe “Industrial Revolution narrative,” namely the language of post-War West Germany inits intensive relationship to contemporary Turkish society. In his macroscopic study of“the global-language system,” Words of the World, Abram de Swaan classified worldlanguages according to their relative social value in a global lattice of multilingualspeakers. 14 Ranking English as “hypercentral,” and German as “supercentral,” de Swaanlocates Turkish as a subordinate or “central” language, which gravitates towardstranslatability with the super- and hypercentral languages that govern international tradeand press traffic. I will claim that Pamuk’s novel—which is assumed to reference Turkishnational space—is preoccupied with the political workings of such a global languagesystem, as instantiated in how contemporary discourses about Turkey are inevitablyrouted through the supercentral language of German.We will remember how, from an immeasurable distance, Kafka’s K. took in theoutermost turret of the castle of Count Westwest:There was something quite mad about this—ending in a kind of terrace, whosebattlements, uncertain, irregular, brittle, as though drawn by the anxious or carelesshand of a child, zigzagged into the blue sky. It was as if some gloomy resident, who13 Gayatri C. Spivak. “Translation as Culture.” Translation: Reflections, Refractions, Transformations. EdsPaul St-Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar. Delhi: Pencraft International. 2005, 238–50. 241.14 de Swaan 2001.207

should have rightly remained locked up in the most out-of-the-way room in thehouse, had broken through the roof and risen to reveal himself to the world. 15Composed in the era of EU-Turkey membership negotiations—in which the West’sEastern border is “uncertain, irregular, brittle”—Snow leaves behind the charismatic I–Thou moment of encounter between Turkey and Europe that had propelled the syncreticlyricism of The White Castle. The novel also omits the sustained meditations on theemblematic bi-continental space of !stanbul that have been Pamuk’s poetic signature inother texts—including The White Castle, The Black Book and the literary-historicalmemoir "stanbul. As the traditional hub of East-West connections—and what EmilyApter refers to as the birthplace of comparative literature 16 —the megalopolis of !stanbulis little more than a pit-stop in the novel, a text that prefers instead to investigate the more“out-of-the-way rooms” of the West.In relocating K. to this limit case of Westernness, the city of Kars, Pamuk’s novel isconcerned with the precarious stakes under which subjects in the “out-of-the-way rooms”of Europe recognize and are recognized by “the West,” and how their own claims on oragainst Westernness are monitored—or repudiated—over time. The complex spatiotemporalredistribution of symbolic Westernness undermines the doppelgängerencounters and mirror-imagery so vividly portrayed in The White Castle. Instead, Snowbrings another kind of uncanny relationship to bear in his figural project. Instead ofshepherding two strangers into a symbolic intercultural epiphany, the novel’s binding15 Kafka 1998, 8. Kafka 1982, 19. “Etwas Irrsinniges hatte das—und einem söllerartigen Abschluss, dessenMauerzinnen unsicher, unregelmäßig, brüchig, wie von ängstlicher oder nachlässiger Kinderhandgezeichnet, sich in den blauen Himmel zackten. Es war, wie wenn ein trübseliger Hausbewohner, dergerechterweise im entlegensten Zimmer des Hauses sich hätte eingesperrt halten sollen, das Dachdurchbrochen und sich erhoben hätte, um sich der Welt zu zeigen.”16 Apter 1995, 86–86.208

intimacies lie beyond the threshold of the text, in the symbolic, dominant monolingualismof the Other.In surreptitiously evoking Kafka’s last, unfinished novel, The Castle becomes forSnow an always deniable hypotext, or figural “secret sharer.” Pamuk is thus able todramatize a particular subaltern space, shot through with symbolic traces of the (German)West. Yet in so doing, Pamuk’s novel—somewhat counterintuitively—shares in theproject of “resisting the thinking of comparability […] as a kind of paralyzing conditionof derivation from Europe—a way of thinking […] latent even in our best efforts tobroaden the discipline of comparatism today.” 17 Snow resists any comparative impulse toread the two novels as equidistant, comparable mirror-images. In lieu of such a “parallelproject,” Snow “unknowingly” emulates Kafka’s unfinishable text, reanimating the forcesof interpellation and desire that compel Kafka’s abbreviated hero K. through the snowystreets below the castle.A Moveable EastThe world republic of letters has its own mode ofoperation; its own economy, which produceshierarchies and various forms of violence, andabove all, its own history, which, long obscured bythe quasi-systematic national (and thereforepolitical) appropriation of literary stature, hasnever really been chronicled.—Pascal Casanova, The World Republic of Letters 18When Kafka’s K. takes a closer look at the bricoleur nature of the castle, he sees not aunion but a horizontal multitude of dispersed constructions:17 Ertürk 2008, 43.18 Casanova 2004, 12209

On the whole the Castle, as it appeared from this distance, corresponded to K.’sexpectations. It was neither an old knight’s fortress nor a magnificent new edifice,but a large complex, made up of a few two-story buildings and many lower, tightlypacked ones; had one not known that this was a castle, one could have taken it for asmall town. K. saw only one tower, whether it belonged to a dwelling or a churchwas impossible to tell. 19A more elegant description of today’s European Union in a moment of expansion fatigueand discord between its religious and secular roots is hardly imaginable. Often referred toas Fortress Europe by its political detractors, the European Union plays a complex intraandextratextual role in Snow. The novel itself was the result of sweeping pro-EUpolitical reforms in Turkey in the early 2000s that dismantled censorship statutes to theextent that Orhan Pamuk could publish a political novel about contemporary Turkey,which highlights—if not always by name—the Armenian genocide, the ongoing war inKurdistan, domestic phone-tapping, the Turkish secret police bureaucracy, and Islamistfomentation in Germany. (Pamuk sought legal counsel in examining the manuscript lineby line to ensure the novel would pass muster with this new, liberalized censor.) Thus theresulting text is, to a great extent, itself an artifact of post-Schengen European integration,despite the perennial stumbling blocks between Turkey and EU membership. For mostcharacters within the novel, the protracted negotiations with Brussels for EU membershipevoke a vague feeling of a broken promise, of something that no longer seems worthdwelling on.19 Kafka 1998, 8. Kafka 1982, 18. “Im ganzen entsprach das Schloß, wie es sich hier von der Ferne zeigte,K.s Erwartungen. Es war weder eine alte Ritterburg noch ein neuer Prunkbau, sondern eine ausgedehnteAnlage, die aus wenigen zweistöckigen, aber aus vielen eng aneinander stehenden niedrigen Bautenbestand; hätte man nicht gewußt, daß es ein Schloß sei, hätte man es für ein Städtchen halten können.Nur einen Turm sah K., ob er zu einem Wohngebäude oder einer Kirche gehörte, war nicht zuerkennen.”210

One of the many ex-Communist politicos in Kars, Turgut Bey, resigned himself tothis stance:“But we all know what Europe has come to mean,” Turgut Bey continued. “Europeis our future, and the future of our humanity. So if this gentleman”—here hepointed at [the Islamist organizer] Blue—“thinks we should say all humanity insteadof Europe, we might as well change our statement accordingly.”“Europe’s not my future,” said Blue with a smile.” As long as I live I shall neverimitate them or hate myself for being unlike them.”More than any of the two author’s other novels, Snow and The Castle are both compelledand confounded by East-West questions, which are no less existential for either than it ispolitical. In contrast to the high-finance metropolis of The Trial, the snowy domain ofThe Castle has a peculiarly pre-urban feel that flouts K.’s Enlightenment predilection forrational justice and communicative transparency. The repetition in Count Westwest’sname is both a tautology and a paradox: though cardinal binaries (East-West and North-South) and intercardinal bearings (northwest, southeast, etc.) have self-evident meanings,K.’s hyper-cardinal bearing, westwest, has no cartographical referent. Neither a locationnor orientation, westwest is rather a directive—(“West, West!”)— a compulsion toexemplify a hyperbolically Western manner of civic subjectivity.Upon returning from Frankfurt after 12 years, Pamuk’s Ka beholds an !stanbul soincommensurable with his childhood memories that he pushes further east, hoping to rediscoverthere the consoling post-imperial melancholy of the 1950s. The cross-countrybus drops him off in Kars, a northeastern Turkish-Armenian-Georgian border city ondecommissioned trade routes with the Russian Empire and Austro-Hungary, a city thatexperienced a golden age of Westernization in the first decades of the twentieth century,211

gaining fame as one of the most “Western” cities in West Asia. In the early TurkishRepublican period, however, the border with Armenia was permanently closed and thecity became subsumed in the mythical Anatolian East—a region now primarily iterable inWestern European press coverage for state military incursions against Kurdish freedomfighters,inveterate structural unemployment, and populist Islamic fomentation. 20Once an affluent city in the early twentieth century, Kars impresses upon thenewcomer Ka a skeletal, post-imperial melancholy. Traces of Slavic design andarchitecture reinforce a sense of transnational connectivity, in keeping with Kafka’simagined provincial cities in such parables as “An Old Document.” Although Kaeventually takes notice of the city’s crumbling Seljuk castle—topped with the star-andcrescentflag of Republican Turkey—his attention is first drawn to the poorest of Kars’municipal districts, the shantytown called Kaleiçi, or “within the castle.” After a briskmorning walk through its snowy streets, Ka senses that:It wasn’t the poverty or the helplessness [in Kaleiçi (“within the castle”)] thatdisturbed him, it was the thing he would see again and again during the days tocome […] in the crowded teahouses where the city’s unemployed passed the timeplaying cards. […] It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten,as if it were snowing at the end of the world.As if to console himself, Ka remembers that the city had experienced a golden age ofWesternization before the fall of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Czar Alexander hadordered the construction of five parallel avenues “like never before seen in the East,” andthe city’s thriving middle class enjoyed the spoils of a trade route linking two20 Deniz Göktürk. “Schwarzes Buch in Weißer Festung: Entschwindende Erzähler auf postmodernenPfaden in der türkischen Literatur.” Der Deutschunterricht 5 (1993): 32–45. Erika Greber. “Ost-Westliche Spiegelungen: Der Doppelgänger als kulturkritische Metapher.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschriftfür Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. 66.3 (1993): 539–94.212

Westernizing powers. Yet since the beginning of the Turkish Republican period in the1920s, Kars had gradually lost its autonomy and affluence, and its 500 year-old castleeffectively ceased to signal local power and hierarchy. To Ka’s eyes, the castle buildingabove Kaleiçi is a semiotic ruin—ostentatious, marginal, and evacuated. Kars thus saw itsWesternness discursively rescinded amid the downfall of three empires—the Hapsburgs,the Ottomans, and the Romanovs—and the rise of programmatic nationalization.In the last years of his life, as he was working on the manuscript for The Castle,Kafka also beheld a momentous geopolitical shift from multinational empire to nationalsovereignty, as Prague became the capital of a newly Eastern European CzechoslovakRepublic. The Castle was singular among his longer prose works for being entirelycomposed after the fall of the Hapsburg’s multinational, multilingual empire, and thefounding of a newly “eastern” array of Central European nation-states. Thus, both novelswere composed in transitional periods of acute geopolitical reconstitution, where thedelineation of East and West remained both elusive and illusory.213

Defeasible Affinities 21The rub of the issue is their resemblance, twofigures for the same thing, sameness being theorder of correspondence, for comically faultyauthority.—Hokenson and Munson, The Bilingual Text 22Critics have been as quick to notice “parallels” between Pamuk’s Snow and Kafka’s TheCastle as they have been reluctant to analyze them. In the May 12, 2005 edition of TheNew York Review of Books, Christian Caryl mentioned an “echo or two of Kafka’s heroK.,” pointing out that Snow’s protagonist sheds his given name as a teenager to take onthe acronymic nickname Ka, “even if it meant conflict with teachers and governmentofficials.” Though the novel’s epigraphs—from Browning, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, andConrad—have emboldened reviewers in their long-held hunches about Pamuk’saspirations in world literature, Snow is assiduously silent about its textual partnershipwith The Castle.But both Kafka’s K. and Pamuk’s Ka arrive in their snowed-in provincial cities asforeign latecomers:It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was nosign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam oflight suggested the large Castle. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that21 This subtitle is a reference to Zafer -enocak’s novel Dangerous Affinities [Gefährliche Verwandschaft],itself a citation of Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities [Die Wahlverwandtschaften]. -enocak’snovel shares in Pamuk’s pursuit of a submerged history of transnational relationships between Turkey,Germany, and Eastern Europe. Zafer -enocak. Gefährliche Verwandtschaft. Munich: Babel, 1998.22 Hokenson and Munson 2007, 12.214

leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness.Then he went looking for a night’s lodging. 23And from Snow:When, at ten o’clock at night, three hours behind schedule, the bus began its crawlthrough the snow-covered streets of Kars, Ka couldn’t recognize the city at all. Hecouldn’t even see the railroad station, where he’d arrived twenty years earlier bysteam engine, nor could he see any sign of the hotel to which his driver had takenhim that day (following a full tour of the city): the Hotel Republic, “a telephone inevery room.” It was as if everything had been erased, lost beneath the snow. 24Both Snow and The Castle thus open with the absence of a discernible castle as the heroarrives, late at night. In both cases, only snow is visible: Kafka’s K. is certain that he willeventually re-discover “the” castle despite the restricted visibility. Pamuk’s Ka is,however, indifferent at first to Kars’ city castle. Instead, Ka appears shaken by theabsence of the city’s memorable sites from his previous visit decades hence: the trainstation and the Snow Palace Hotel [Kar Palas Oteli]. He recalls that hotel had beenowned and renovated by a Western-leaning professor in the early twentieth century.Both protagonists are greeted as long-anticipated VIP emissaries and meddlesomeinterlopers with bad manners. Each sees himself as destined to pursue a recalcitrantpolitical cabal and an insider logic that represents the “hereness” of Kars, and of the textitself. But unannounced escorts and unlikely detours aggravate both their searches, as if23 Kafka 1998, 1. Kafka 1982. 8. “Es war spät abend als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefem Schnee. VomSchlossberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächsteLichtschein deutete das große Schloss an. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke die von der Landstraßezum Dorf führt und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor. Dann gieng er ein Nachtlager suchen.”24 Pamuk 2002, 12. Pamuk 2004, 6. “Otobüs karlar altındaki Kars sokaklarına saat onda, üç saat gecikmi$olarak girdi#inde Ka $ehrin hiç tanıyamadı. Yirmi yil once buraya buharlı trenle geldi#i bahar günündekar$ısına çıkan istasyon binasının da, arabacının onu bütün $ehri dola$tırdıktan sonra götürdü#ü herodası telefonlu Cumuriyet Oteli’nin de nerede oldu#unu çıkaramadı. Karın altında her $ey silinmi$,kaybolmu$ gibiydi.”215

according to a deliberate design. This cascade of preordained events presents K. and Kawith a dizzying social landscape of prescription and panopticism. In Snow, Ka is nearlyas often admonished for taking meetings as he is entreated to accept new ones. Such isthe case when he voluntarily meets with Islamist sympathizers, for which the localnewspaper editor takes him comically to task:“After you left us, you had meetings with the wrong people, and those people toldyou the wrong things about our border city,” said Serdar Bey.“How could you know where I’ve been?” asked Ka“Naturally, the police were following you,” said the newspaperman. “And forprofessional reasons, we listen in on police communication with this transistorradio. Ninety percent of the news we print comes from the office of the governorand the Kars police headquarters.”Ka begins to suspect that the inscrutable object of his pursuit changes its orientation atevery step. Upon receiving a friendly invitation to join a local sheik for a tête-à-tête, hispatience for all this ceremonious hospitality dissolves: “Am I supposed to pay myrespects to every lunatic in Kars?”The interlocking synchronization of institutional functionaries, scheduled andsurveiled interviews, and (mis)guided tours through the snow reanimates K.’s roundrobinantics with the accidental spokespersons of Kafka’s castle. Barnabus, Gerstäcker,and Klamm’s village superintendent Monus accompany and evade, console and rebukeK. in his pursuit of an ultimate audience with Westwest. The charismatic leader of thecity’s headscarf-wearing movement, the young Kadife—herself once a leftist !stanbulintellectual—enlightens Ka as to the social life of the city: “In Kars everyone always216

knows about everything that’s going on.” Here Ka’s journalistic resolve begins to falter,as he confronts the prescriptive nature of social knowledge in this strange city.Surveying the LandI also pose the question of my credibility and reliability, as I—a“Westernized” observer from $stanbul—disseminate a judgment about aplace in my country that is so troubled and oppressed.Orhan Pamuk 25Just back from twelve years of political exile in Frankfurt am Main, Pamuk’s newcomerKa depends on institutional auspices to guarantee his status as a commissioned, outsideexpert in Kars. In order to be guaranteed access and an audience with prominent localfigures, he arrives with a phony press credential as a reporter for a secularist dailynewspaper based in !stanbul. When asked, Ka explains that he has been dispatched tocover local elections and a suicide epidemic among “covered”—headscarf-wearing—teenage girls in Kars.The liberal-Kemalist newspaper Cumhuriyet [The Republic] sponsoring hisinvestigative venture to the other end of the land began publishing in 1924, one year afterthe Treaty of Lausanne recognized post-imperial Turkey as a sovereign state. In nameand in spirit, this newspaper is co-terminus with the Turkish Republic’s aggressiveWesternization program and its archetype, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as well as with thestruggling laicist Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi]. In view ofKemalism’s violent suppression of public Islam since the founding of the Turkish25 Orhan Pamuk and Hubert Spiegel. “Ich werde sehr sorgfältig über meine Worte nachdenken.”Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 6 Jul. 2005. “Ich stelle ja auch die Frage nach meiner Zuverlässigkeitund Glaubwürdigkeit, wenn ich, ein „verwestlichter” Beobachter von !stanbul, ein Urteil über einenderart aufgewühlten und geschundenen Ort meines Landes verbreite.”217

Republic, the symbolism of Ka’s arrival to Kars as a reporter for The Republic comes intoclearer focus.Mis-measurementsHe needn’t even speak to me, I’ll be sufficientlygratified on seeing the effect my words have onhim, and if they have none, or if he doesn’t hear aword I say, I will still have gained something fromthe chance to speak frankly to a person withpower.—K., The Castle 26Though he claims to be in Kars on assignment, Ka’s covert motivation for his visit is tofind and marry !pek, his old friend from leftist student circles in !stanbul, therebyrescuing her from the throes of activist Islam and bringing her back to her Kemalist roots.Ka’s hubris of “uncovering” the story of the “covered” girls—an ambivalent mix ofsanctioned journalistic ambition and clandestine romantic conquest—recalls FrantzFanon’s writings on Algeria during the 1950s. For Fanon, the French desire to uncoverAlgerian women exhibited the “crystallization of an aggressiveness, the strain of a kindof violence.... Unveiling this woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring her secret,breaking her resistance. There is in it the will to bring this woman within his reach, tomake her a possible object of possession.” 27Ka’s somewhat disingenuous self-designation as a reporter for Cumhuriyetprofoundly pre-structures his itinerary. Upon his arrival, he is promptly whisked into a26 Franz Kafka. The Castle. Trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books, 1998. 50. Franz Kafka.Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe: Das Schloß. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982. 83. “Es [ist] gar nicht nötig,dass er mit mir spricht, es genügt mir, wenn ich den Eindruck sehe, den meine Worte auf ihn machen,und machen sie keinen oder hört er sie gar nicht, habe ich doch den Gewinn, frei vor einem Mächtigengesprochen zu haben.”27 Frantz Fanon. “Algeria Unveiled.” Trans. Haakon Chevalier. Decolonization: Perspectives from Nowand Then. Ed. Prasenjit Duara. London: Routledge, 2003. 48.218

series of meetings—with the police chief, the newspaper editor, the mayor, andeventually the rebel ringleader Lacivert. A young religious student, Necip, is tasked witharranging this clandestine meeting with Lacivert, about which he informs Ka, “Myinstructions are such that I cannot give you the name of the person you need to meetunless you first agree to meet him.”One of the targets of Ka’s reportage in Snow, the philandering terrorist Lacivert(Blue), gives Ka some unwanted career counseling as follows: “The Turkish press isinterested in its country’s troubles only if the Western press takes an interest first. […]Otherwise it’s offensive to discuss poverty and suicide; they talk about these things as ifthey happen in a land beyond the civilized world. Which means that you too will beforced to publish your article in Europe.” Here Lacivert sketches out for Ka howknowledge about Turkey must first be solicited from the West European press before itcan be widely disseminated among a domestic readership.The Islamist cabal nonetheless perceives Ka as a direct conduit to the Europeanpress—by way of a (comically named) German reporter Hans Hansen, who is said towork for the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. Ka is thus invited to sit in on aclandestine summit at the Hotel Asia, where religious agitators intend to produce a pressrelease explaining their position on the unrest and attempted coup in Kars. This attempt atcollective enunciation, however, falters from the start: “At first no one spoke, so surewere they that the room was bugged and that there were several informers present.” Noteven the opening brainstorm question “If a big German newspaper gave you personallytwo lines of space, what would you say to the West?” generates usable ideas, and themeeting aborts amid this stalemate of representation.219

Like so many “reporters” in Kafka’s works, Pamuk’s Ka never completes the writtenreport he insists he has been chosen to compose—neither the article for The Republic northe Islamist rebels’ proposed press release “to the people of Europe” in the FrankfurterRundschau. Still Ka retains his singularity as the chosen expert outsider. As K. remarksin The Castle:“Of course,” said K., “one should not judge too soon. For now all I know about theCastle is that one understands how to pick out the right landsurveyor there.” 28Although K. entitles himself to an audience with the castle in his capacity aslandsurveyor, this may also turn out to be a designation that threatens “audacity andhubris (Vermessenheit) and, most importantly, the possibility of making a mistake whilemeasuring (sich vermessen).” 29 John Zilcosky’s suspicion that the word “vermessen” (tomeasure falsely) lies at the heart of K.’s grand task as self-appointed landsurveyor in TheCastle—an ambition that Walter Sokel referred to as a great fraud perpetuated against thereader—is potently reiterated in Pamuk’s novel. 30Along with the drooling man who expels the narrator Orhan from the German hall ofbelles lettres with his “tongue/language,” another character compounds the insult bycondemning his attempts to write a novel about modern Turkey at all. Fazıl, a formerstudent of Kars’ Islamist academy and one of Ka’s most pensive informants, reproachesthe author and his land-surveying hubris:Kafka 1982, 15. “Freilich,” sagte K., “man soll nicht verfrüht urteilen. Vorläufig weiß ich ja vom Schlossnichts weiter, als daß man es dort versteht, sich den richtigen Landvermesser auszusuchen.”29 Zilcosky 2003, 49.30 Walter Herbert Sokel. The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka. Detroit, Mich: WayneState University Press, 2002. 59.220

“I can tell from your face that you want to tell the people who read your novel howpoor we are and how different we are from them. I don’t want you to put me in anovel like that.”“Why not?”“Because you don’t even know me, that’s why! Even if you got to know me anddescribe me as I am, your Western readers would be so caught up in pitying me forbeing poor that they wouldn’t have a chance to see my life. For example, if you saidI was writing an Islamist science-fiction novel, they’d just laugh.”This exchange is an instance of what Edward Said described as a self-reflexive “way ofdescribing the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writesabout.” 31 Fazıl finally demands that “his author” Orhan Pamuk—who Azade Seyhan calls“the unofficial interpreter of Islam for the American public”—inform readers that nothingsaid about Kars in the novel is true. 32 Snow thus closes with one character’s antagonisticrebuke about the author’s hubris of “writing outside the nation,” a charge echoing thoseof Pamuk’s domestic critics who view his work as pandering to Western culturalpaternalism. 3331 Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. 20.32 Azade Seyhan. “Is Orientalism in Retreat or in for a New Treat? Halide Edip Adivar and Emine SevgiÖzdamar Write Back.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 41.3 (2005): 209–225. 216.33 Azade Seyhan. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. On domesticcritiques of Orhan Pamuk, see for instance Demirta% Ceyhun. “Nobel Orhan Pamuk'a verilmi% birücrettir.” Türksolu 11 Jun. 2006.221

The Implanted AuthorWhen we meet someone in a novel who remindsus of ourselves, our first wish is for that characterto explain to us who we are. […] If I woke up onemorning to find that I had turned into anenormous cockroach, what would become of me?[…] What I need to ponder most is this: who isthis ‘other’ we so need to imagine? This creaturewho is nothing like us addresses our mostprimitive hates, fears, and anxieties.—Orhan Pamuk, “In Kars and Frankfurt”Kafka’s K. comes to a less violent—though no less abrupt—end than Pamuk’s K. InSeptember 1922, Kafka wrote to his friend Max Brod, “I did not have a happy time of itthis week, since it appears that I have had to give up the castle story for good.” 34 InBrod’s redacted edition the text of the The Castle trails off in mid sentence:The room in Gerstäcker’s cottage was only dimly illuminated by the fire in thehearth and by a candle stump in the light of which someone deep inside an alcovesat bent under the crooked protruding beam, reading a book. It was Gerstäcker’smother. She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, shespoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said 35No closer to the castle of Westwest than when he first crossed into the snowy village,K. and his pursuit expire during this encounter with an old woman reading silently froman unidentified book. Though The Castle manuscript remained unfinished at the time ofKafka’s own death, the Frankfurt City Library, where Pamuk’s Ka sits reading eighty34Franz Kafka, Erich Heller, Joachim Beug, eds. Franz Kafka. Munich: Heimeran, 1969. 101. “DieseWoche habe ich nicht sehr lustig verbracht, denn ich habe die Schlossgeschichte offenbar für immerliegen lassen müssen.”35 Kafka 1998, 316. Kafka 1992, 495. “Die Stube in Gerstäckers Hütte war nur vom Herdfeuer mattbeleuchtet und von einem Kerzenstumpf, bei dessen Licht jemand in einer Nische gebeugt unter dendort vortretenden schiefen Dachbalken in einem Buche las. Es war Gerstäckers Mutter. Sie reichteK. die zitternde Hand und ließ ihn neben sich niedersetzen, mühselig sprach sie, man hatte Mühe sie zuverstehen, aber was sie sagte”.222

years later, holds thirteen copies of the novel, including Kamuran -ipal’s Turkishtranslation—from the series Classics of the Twentieth Century. 36While K. in The Castle had been the sole aperture of narrative authority in the text,Snow is frame-narrated by Orhan Pamuk, a diegetic double of the author, who relatesmost of what he knows about the German-Anatolian travels of his high school friend, asecular middle-class poet from !stanbul’s affluent Ni$anta$ı neighborhood. Neither adisinterested frame narrator nor an apologist, Orhan follows the itinerary of his recentlyassassinated friend—from their shared hometown of !stanbul, to Frankfurt am Main, andon to the Eastern border city of Kars. Recounting Ka’s experiences with a degree ofinteriority and affect that far exceeds his corroborating sources, Orhan traces his friend’ssteps so faithfully that the local grocer in Kars begins to confuse the two men. “I almostfelt I was Ka,” admits Orhan, wondering, as do his readers, “How much of this wascoincidence, how much was just my imagining?” 37This narrator Orhan recalls how his friendship with Ka began in their teenage years,when the two boys were engrossed in European literature. Whether the homophonicequivalence between Kerim’s newly chosen nickname and Kafka’s archetype wasdeliberate or significant for the two friends remains undisclosed throughout Snow. Yetthe two ethnically unmarked abbreviations K. and Ka—pronounced identically whetherin Turkish or German—are subject to an indissoluble différance despite their perpetualmissed encounter. Telling the two names “apart” from one another would be possibleonly in the context of writing or reading.36 Franz Kafka. $ato. Trans. Kamuran -ipal. !stanbul: Cem Yayınları 2000.37 Pamuk 2002, 413. Pamuk 2004. 411.223

But Ka does not like being mistaken for anyone else, least of all a character insomebody else’s novel. Unwittingly calling attention to the irresolvable ambiguitybetween himself and K., Ka vainly admonishes the editor of Kars’ Border City Gazettefor misprinting his name:“My name is printed wrong,” said Ka. “The A should be lowercase.” He regrettedsaying this. “But it looks good,” he added, as if to make up for his bad manners.“My dear sir, it was because we weren’t sure of your name that we tried to get intouch with you,” said Serdar Bey. “Son, look here, you printed our poet’s namewrong.” But as he scolded the boy there was no surprise in his voice. Ka guessedthat he was not the first to have noticed that the name had been misprinted. “Fix itright now.”Ka’s compulsion to correct the spelling of his own name (after the paper has already goneto press), along with the newspaperman’s relative indifference underscores the parody ofidentity politics that is underway. Ka is obsessed with being unprecedented, whileeveryone he meets insists that they already know his story.Insisting on DifféranceIn The Castle, though some interlocutors in the village come up with documents thatseem to certify K.’s existence, he remains an unknown quantity of sorts, and readers ofThe Castle learn less and less about who K. is over the course of the novel. Most of his“attributes” are produced through self-euphemization—a stance toward the castle thatEric Santner termed “nomotropic.” 38 The narrative alleges that K. is a foreigner/stranger,that he has no prior acquaintances in the castle village, and that he has made no(successful) arrangements for house and gainful employment. A few childhood memories38 Eric L. Santner. “Freud’s “Moses” and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire.” October 88 (1999): 3–41.224

surface—for instance, a halcyon image of K. as a young boy, climbing over the wall ofhis hometown cemetery, clutching a flag in his teeth. The “fourth-person” narratorsometimes muses about the difficulties of being “so far away from wife and child,” butsuch rhetorical gestures never amount to personal attributes.Avital Ronell has stressed how Kafka’s K. functions less as an embodied subject withan interior emotional life of his own than as a “mark of incompletion,” an abbreviatedicon standing for a generic position. The recalcitrant, absent castle itself “requires K. toproduce an identity. In front of anyone… who claims to be a representative of theCastle.” In the absence of any salient documentation—passport, letter of invitation,credentials as landsurveyor—K.’s existence as a civic subject is not a matter of public orimperial record. Where Kafka’s K. had stood “for a long time on the wooden bridge”before entering the revier of the castle, no equivalent long-durée period of marginalitybefore the state applies in Ka’s personal history.In Snow, the first-person frame narrator sees to it that his friend Ka is far more than a“mark of incompletion.” Ka is a Turkish national, and it is because the Turkish statealready has his various (authentic and falsified) home addresses on file that he is forcedto seek political exile in West Germany, where his twelve-year residence is equally welldocumented at the Bureau of Asylum. Unlike K. then, Ka’s status as a denizen of (bothGerman and Turkish) governance is multiple, verifiable, and uncontested. As aconsequence, Ka is doubly foreign—known as a Turkish poet when in Germany and aGerman journalist when in Turkey. Despite this double-bind of deterritorialization, he hasdeliberately avoided learning the German language—in hopes of “preserving his soul.”225

(We will remember how forthcoming Kafka’s K. was in speaking French with the villageschoolmaster.)Because he is an always-already governed “national,” Ka is unable to maintain aseamless, self-fashioned persona as K. had done, unable to perpetuate the “colossalfraud” on his readers that Sokel accused him of. 39 Orhan—Ka’s friend and champion inthe text—plays narrative tricks on Ka—or, more precisely, on the monopolization ofperspective that Friedrich Beißner described in Kafka as “uni-directionality”[Einsinnigkeit], and Joseph Vogel reconceptualized as “fourth person narrative.” 40 WhenK. in The Castle is asleep, no narrative detail is provided about him or his surroundings.The non-omniscient narrative is restricted to the protagonist’s own range of perceptions.In Snow, Orhan—though not omniscient—sneaks biographical information into the textwhile the protagonist is sleeping, against the latter’s wishes. When Ka falls asleep on hisneighbor’s shoulder during the snowy busride to Kars, Orhan intrudes in a tone thatborders on gossip: “Let us take advantage of this lull to whisper a few biographicaldetails.” 41 It is during this furtive, hasty interlude that the reader accesses the sort ofdata—ethnic, biographical, civic—that Kafka’s texts tend to abrogate.In the post-Imperial era of the nation-state, Pamuk thus reintroduces Kafka’s K. notas an abbreviation pursuing a legitimating audience with the West, but as the postmodernheir to that generic position: a mobile, middle-class intellectual who no longer39 Sokel 2002. 59.40 “Kafka’s peculiar use of indirect discourse, generating seemingly smooth transitions between first- andthird-person narration, between I and He, tends to present a self only at the moment when it has alreadybecome an other, disappearing into a plurality of voices that Joseph Vogl has termed the impersonal ‘it’of a “fourth person.” Bianca Theisen. “A Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings ofSaturn.” MLN 121.3 (2006): 563–581. 573. Joseph Vogl. “Vierte Person. Kafkas Erzählstimme,”Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 68 (1994): 745–756. 754.41 Pamuk 2002,10. Pamuk 2004, 4. “Uyumasından yararlanıp onun hakkında sessizce biraz bilgi verelim.”226

needs nor seeks legitimating from the classic elites of state power. His “castle” lieselsewhere, fractured and multiple on the trade routes of symbolic capital between Turkeyand Germany.The Castle in RuinsWe don’t need a surveyor. There wouldn’t be theleast bit of work for a person like that. Theboundaries of our small holdings have beenmarked out, everything has been duly registered,the properties themselves rarely change hands,and whatever small boundary disputes arise, wesettle ourselves. So why should we have any needfor a surveyor?—Momus the Chairman to K., The Castle 42Kafka’s castle, which K. perceived as territorially bound, towering “free and light” abovethe village, always seemed close enough to guarantee ultimate access; its consolingpresence on the horizon convinced him to tolerate the drifts of snow and circuitouspathways for one more hour:K. kept expecting the street to turn at last toward the Castle and it was only in thisexpectation that he kept going; no doubt out of weariness he was reluctant to leavethis street, what amazed him, too, was the length of this village, which wouldn’t end,again and again those tiny little houses and the frost-covered windowpanes and thesnow and not a living soul. 43Given the baffling length (and yet deictic unity) of the village, it is no wonder that Snowtransposes the “atopia” of Westwest’s domain across a transnational landscape stretching42 Kafka 1982, 95. Kafka 1998, 59. “Wir brauchen keinen Landvermesser. Es wäre nicht die geringsteArbeit für ihn da. Die Grenzen unserer kleinen Wirtschaften sind abgesteckt, alles ist ordentlicheingetragen. Besitzwechsel kommt kaum vor und kleine Grenzstreitigkeiten regeln wir selbst. Was solluns also ein Landvermesser?”43 Kafka 1982, 21. Kafka 1998, 10. “Immer erwartete K., daß nun endlich die Straße zum Schloß einlenkenmüsse und nur, weil er es erwartete, ging er weiter; offenbar infolge seiner Müdigkeit zögerte er, dieStraße zu verlassen, auch staunte er über die Länge des Dorfes, das kein Ende nahm, immer wieder diekleinen Häuschen und vereisten Fensterscheiben und Schnee und Menschenleere.”227

from Kars to Frankfurt. Over the course of his investigation, Ka discovers how theprivileged status that both he and the terrorist ringleader Lacivert enjoy in Kars relies onthe symbolic and infrastructural capital of their “German connections.” In fact, all ofKars’ Islamist organizers—Muhtar, Kadife, Lacivert, and Necip—were once active in thestudent movements at universities in Germany or !stanbul. The local Islamist cabal thatKa intended to uncover in Kars is thus neither autochthonous nor anti-modern, it relies ontransnational, secularist, and urban power. In fact, little political capital in Kars derivesfrom local—or even national—institutions. Ka himself enjoys a privileged status amongKars’ Islamist rebels because he is connected to a prominent German press agent fromthe Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, Hans Hansen, who might publish on their behalf“An Open Letter to the People of Europe Regarding the Events in Kars.”Ka also notices that the Kars Border Gazette is printed on a hand-me-down pressfrom Hamburg, and that the surveillance equipment that government intelligence agentsuse to catch Islamists on tape are manufactured by Grundig, an emblem of the WestGerman Economic Miracle [Wirtschaftswunder]. Compounding these traces of Germanmanufacture are the very letters on the novel’s page. (Mustafa) Kemal Atatürk, whoseinitials Ka shares, is reported to have first entertained the idea of converting writtenTurkish from the Arabo-Persian to Latin upon leafing through Julius Németh’s 1916Türkische Grammatik, printed in Leipzig. 44 Thus the means for reproducing meaning inthe novel (press, alphabet, recording devices) all trace back to German manufacture.Like the headscarf-wearing girls he has come to cover in Kars, Ka is also envelopedin a conspicuous garment himself: an overcoat he bought at the Kaufhof department store44 A. Dilaçar. Devlet dili olarak Türkçe. Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1962. 41.228

during his exile in Frankfurt am Main. This ostentatiously European accessory figures atthe very beginning of the novel as follows: “We should note straightaway that this softdowny beauty of a coat would cause him shame and disquiet during the days he was tospend in Kars, while also furnishing a sense of security.” 34 At their first meeting, theIslamist organizer Lacivert praises Ka’s coat and tries to prevent him from taking it off—in a kind of counter-gesture to the secular impulse to sartorially liberate devout women:“Please don’t take off your coat until the room has warmed up… It’s a beautifulcoat. Where did you buy it?”“In Frankfurt.”“Frankfurt…. Frankfurt,” Blue murmured, and he lifted his eyes to the ceiling andlost himself in thought. Then he explained that “some time ago” he had been foundguilty under Article 163 of promoting the establishment of a state based on religiousprinciples and had for this reason escaped to Germany. 45Like Dorothy returning to Oz, Ka finds that the castle is not the sovereign arbiter ofmeaning it once had been for K. In the post-imperial city of Kars, remnants of the castleinclude the evacuated shell of the Seljuk castle-ruin, as well as the impoverished districtof Kaleiçi, or “within the Castle,” which is mirrored by the interior of the Frankfurt citylibrary. For Ka, Kars’ sites of memory [lieux de memoire] are rather the transit hub andhotel, the latter of which conjoins the titles of both novels [Snow Palace Hotel]—thetransient non-places of supermodernity. 46 This suggests that authority in modern Kars isdefined not through the local accumulation and exercise of power, but through arrivals45 Pamuk 2002, 76. Pamuk 2004, 73. “‘Paltonuzu soba odayı ısıtana kadar çıkarmayın…Güzel palto.Nerede aldınız?’ / ‘Frankfurt’tan.’ / ‘Frankfurt… Frankfurt,’ dedi Lacivert ve gözünü tavana dikipdü$üncelere daldı. / Dine dayalı bir devlet düzeni kurulması fikrini yaydı#ı için ‘bir zamanlar’ 163.maddeden mahküm oldu#unu, bu yüzden Almanya’ya kaçtı#ını söyledi.”46 Marc Augé. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe.London: Verso, 1995.229

and departures. (There are no such guest accommodations in Kafka’s village, not even apension or hostel for K. to sleep in.) Thus, as the two heroes arrive in their respectivevillages, the initial absence of the castle’s absence in Snow supplants the presence of thecastle’s absence in Kafka’s novel. This intertextual substitution on the novel’s openingpages indicates that a redistribution of institutional power, reaching beyond localrelationships and circumstances, underlies Kars’ recent history.The last segment of the castle, as reconstituted and refigured in Snow, is to be foundback in Frankfurt in the form of the city library, where Ka was assassinated. A mirrorimage of the neighborhood Kaleiçi “within the castle” in Kars, this library is populatedby the subaltern heirs of German Enlightenment, Westernization’s internal Others. Likethe dystopic, “insane” [irrsinnig] close-up of the castle, the Frankfurt library repelsSnow’s narrator Orhan. In addition to being the flagship city for a host of multinationalconglomerates and lending institutions, its non-citizen population hovers atapproximately 27 percent. As the seat of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels,and the location of former West Germany’s single comprehensive repository of Germanlanguagebooks and periodicals, Frankfurt am Main embodies for Ka the site wheretextual representations of Turkey are housed, redacted, and reproduced—reconstitutingTurkishness in the European imagination.230

Meaning in the SnowAs I was gazing out at the enormous snowflakesbouncing softly against the walls of the castlebefore sinking into the dark waters of the river,Fazıl innocently asked why I’d come to Kars.—Orhan, Snow 47The thing that saved me was not learning German.—Ka, Snow 48In Kafka’s novel, snow is a ubiquitous, equalizing substance that obscures and transformsthe signifying power of all objects, except the castle.Now he saw the Castle above, sharply outlined in the clear air and made evensharper by the snow, which traced each shape and lay everywhere in a thin layer.Besides, there seemed to be a great deal less snow up on the hill than here in thevillage, where it was no less difficult for K. to make headway than it had beenyesterday on the main road. Here the snow rose to the cottage windows only toweigh down on the low roofs, whereas on the hill everything soared up, free andlight, or at least seemed to from here. 49The distant castle hill, towering free and light above, gains its singularity because allother forms are covered in a layer of blinding white. Kafka’s snow is at times negativesemiotic potential, at others a medium of translation, imitation, or emulation; snowsilently arbitrates distinction between what is covered and what is exposed. The sheermass of snow deters and enervates K. in his pursuit of an audience with Count Westwest.47 Pamuk 2002, 411. Pamuk 2004, 409. “Ben kaleye ve Kars çayına büyük tanelerle a#ır a#ır ya#an karabakarken Fazıl iyiniyetle Kars’a niye geldi#imi sor[du].”48 Pamuk 2002, 38. Pamuk 2004, 33. “Beni koruyan $ey Almanca ö#renememem oldu.”49 Kafka 1982, 16-17. Kafka 1998, 7. “Nun sah er oben das Schloss deutlich umrissen in der klaren Luftund noch verdeutlicht durch den alle Formen nachbildenden, in dünner Schicht überall liegendenSchnee. Übrigens schien oben auf dem Berg viel weniger Schnee zu sein als hier im Dorf, wo sichK. nicht weniger mühsam vorwärts brachte als gestern auf der Landstraße. Hier reichte der Schnee biszu den Fenstern der Hütten und lastete gleich wieder auf dem niedrigen Dach, aber oben auf dem Bergragte alles frei und leicht empor, wenigstens schien es so von hier aus.”231

Often K. has to clutch Barnabus by the arm in order not to get “stuck” in the endlessdrifts of white; snow is a barrier between K. and meaning.Pamuk translates snow—Kafka’s disfigural medium—from the semiotic to the sociopolitical.As his alibi for coming to the city was to complete a report about covered youngwomen, the metonymy throughout the novel between covering and snow might suggestthat snow is an emblem for the headscarf, or covering [örtü]. Yet Ka discovers graduallyhow the opposite seems to be the case. The entire city subsists invisibly amid the trafficin knowledge about Turkey; it is only the scandal of suicide that puts Kars “on the map”for discussion in the international (and therefore subsequently in the Turkish) press. Thussnow—also the prohibitive agent that allows the local rebels to stage an uprising during athree-day blizzard—is an emblem of epistemic absence, of that which is keptunknowable. Thus Pamuk’s text advances a corollary claim to Said’s axiom on theWest’s intellectual imperialism over “the Orient.” If, for Said, Orientalism was “a libraryor archive of information, commonly, and in some of its aspects, unanimously held,” 50snow is the epistemic absences that such a library produces in the course of an unevenincorporation into a global literary and journalistic circuit of translation.Without Ka’s approval, the Border City Gazette, a daily newspaper with a threefigurecirculation (a quarter of which is mailed to ex-residents of Kars now living in!stanbul), festively announces that the visiting journalist will soon be reading his newpoem “Snow” before a public audience. Ka retorts:“I don’t have a poem called ‘Snow,’ and I’m not going to the theater this evening.Your newspaper will look like it’s made a mistake.”50 Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. 41.232

“Don’t be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before ithappens. They fear us not because we are journalists, but because we can predict thefuture; you should see how amazed they are when things turn out exactly as we’vewritten them. This is what modern journalism is all about. I know you won’t want tostand in the way of our being modern—you don’t want to break our hearts.” 51This farce of writerly sovereignty, the pre- and overdetermined nature of what Ka willand must write, highlights the symbolic role of involuntarily representative authors: inKafka’s case, a self-hating Jewish patient (Gilman), a nomad (Deleuze and Guattari), anantifascist (Kertesz), a recalcitrant son (Brod); in Pamuk’s case an intercultural diplomat,presumptive Nobel Laureate and would-be “state artist” of the Turkish Republic, aposition which Pamuk rejected in 1998.Vanishing EncountersDespite Ka’s desire not to be mistaken for someone else, a relay of call-and-responsepossibilities echoes throughout the novel. Even without considering plot and action, onenotices at least four mirroring relationships: 1) the homophonic protagonists K. and Ka,2) the frame narrator Orhan Pamuk, who feels like he “almost was” his friend Ka, 3) theauthorial Orhan Pamuk and his homonymic narrator-double within the novel, and 4) theextratextual authors Pamuk and Kafka. In each case the subject of the doubling remainsnaive of his respective shadow-subject. Unlike in The White Castle, no moment ofrevelation takes place.51 Pamuk 2002, 34. Pamuk 2004, 29. “‘Kar adlı bir $iirim yok, ak$am da tiyatroya gitmeyece#im. Haberinizyanlı$ çıkacak.’ / ‘O kadar emin olmayın. Daha olaylar gerçekle$meden haberini yazdı#ınız için biziküçümseyen, yaptı#ımızın gazetecilik de#il, kehanet oldu#unu dü$ünen pek çok ki$i daha sonra olylarıntamı tamına bizim yazdı#ımız gibi geli$mesi üzerine hayretlerini gizleyememi$tir. Pek çok olay sırf bizönceden haberini yaptı#ımız için gerçekle$mi$tir. Modern gazetecilik de budur. Siz de bizim Kars’tamodern olma hakkımızı elimimizden almamak, kalbimizi kırmamak [istemiyorsunuz.]’”233

In contrast to Pamuk’s earlier novels, Snow’s spectral partners lie beyond, andbeneath, the text. A figural mise en abyme arching from the authorial Pamuk—throughhis own fictional doubles in the novel, toward K. and Kafka—dramatizes the imbricationsand intimacies in the transnational landscape of Turkish Germany. This incites tellinguncertainties about the contemporary production of knowledge on “Turkey and theWest.” In lieu of a dyadic doppelgänger structure indexing East–West or Ottoman–European relations, Snow assembles a series of ontological envelopes that vanish withinone another. Thus while most explicit political dialogue in the novel invokes (or railsagainst) the stable binary East/West, the text is designed around a series of mutualimbrications, of nesting terms that outline the “hereness” of the novel’s narrative:Kars: Turkey’s easternmost border, $stanbul’s provincial other, the forgotten “out ofthe way room” of Europe, divested of its Westernness over the course of twentiethcenturyTurkish nation-buildingKar: Turkish for “snow”; indicates covering, non-distinction, invisibility, theinchoate, the economy of translatability and translatedness.Ka: Pamuk’s secular $stanbullite poet and journalist, who “enjoys a small, enigmaticfame” under this name Ka;K: Kafka’s self-appointed civic petitioner before castle Westwest. (“Civic” in thesense of civis and civitas.]At the “center” of this structure of envelopes within envelopes:Kars > Kar > Ka > K. < Ka < Kar < Karsis a fictional figure of Westernization: K., standing at an ambiguous, immeasurabledistance from “the semiotic as such.”234

In stark contrast to the binary terms of the “East-West question” [Batı-do!u meselesi]invoked in debates about Turkish–European cultural relations, the terms in the chainabove (location, translation, postnational subjectivity, civic interpellation) do not act ascounter-definitions to one another. Each term both inheres in and constitutes each of theother terms. 52 As Erol suggests in another sense, Pamuk places ostensibly disparate modesof discourse in a “relationship of encapsulation.” 53 In placing this threshold of emulationand encapsulation not within the story itself, as in the White Castle, but on the thresholdbetween text and Kafka’s hypotext, Snow restages K.’s pursuit of enunciation beforeCount Westwest in the age of EU candidacy states, “privileged partnerships,” andSchengen Treaty borders, where the illusion of consolidated power and state sovereigntyhas ultimately lost its traction.52 Roman Jakobson’s discussion of the US Presidential campaign slogan “I like Ike” explores such poeticimbrications as follows: “Both cola of the trisyllabic formula ‘I like /Ike’ rhyme with each other, andthe second of the two rhyming words is fully included in the first one (echo rhyme), /layk/ — /ayk/, aparonomastic image of a feeling which totally envelops its object. Both cola alliterate with each other,and the first of the two alliterating words is included in the second: /ay/–/ayk/, a paronomastic image ofthe loving subject enveloped by the beloved object. The secondary, poetic function of this electionalcatch phrase reinforces its impressiveness and efficacy.” Roman Jakobson. Selected Writings. Trans.Stephen Rudy. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962. 2653 Erol 2007, 404.235

The Furnace in the National TheaterLeopards break into the temple and drink to thedregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this isrepeated over and over again; finally it can becalculated in advance, and it becomes a part of theceremony.—Franz Kafka 54During one of the Snow’s pivotal scenes, a revival performance of the 1940s moralityplay My Country or My Headscarf at Kars’ National Theater quickly descends intobloodshed, as the soldier-actors on stage open fire on Islamist hecklers in the audience.It was only with the third volley that some in the audience realized that the soldierswere firing live rounds; they could tell, just as one could on those evenings whensoldiers rounded up terrorists in the streets, because these shots can be heard inone’s stomach as well as in one’s ears. A strange noise came from the huge GermanmanufacturedBohemian stove that had been heating the hall for forty-four years,the stovepipe had been pierced and was now spewing smoke like an angry teapot atfull boil.The sudden hiss from this huge German-manufactured Bohemian stove [Alman malı iribohem soba] signals Kafka’s “heating” intrusian in this novel as a cipher of worldliterature interrupting nationalist theatrics. But it is the actual bullets shot from the gunsof the play soldiers—the violence of statist pageantry run amok—that rouse this furnaceto alarm. Silent in the “national theater” for the forty-four years preceding this crisis, thefurnace would have been installed in the late 1950s, in the midst of two disparatedevelopments: 1) the birth of the West German guest-worker program, which wouldbring four Turkish generations into constant traffic with Germany and its institutions, and2) the publication of Kafka’s works in Turkish, amid the first broadly successful54 Kafka 1992, 117. “Leoparden brechen in den Tempel ein und saufen die Opferkrüge leer; das wiederholtsich immer wieder; schließlich kann man es vorausberechnen, und es wird ein Teil der Zeremonie.”236

transatlantic attempts to canonize him as a German representative of world literature andas a cosmopolitan artist of culturally transcendent value. The melee at Kars’ NationalTheater in Snow calls these ostensibly disparate historical developments into a befittingcaucauphonous clash: mass foreign labor recruitment in the wake of World War II,secular Turkish nationalism through Westernization after the fall of Empire, theappropriation of Eastern authors for world-literary canonization, the importing of Germancommodities and cultural goods to modern Turkey, and the local backlash against each ofthese, in the form of Kars’ anti-secular rebellion.As a metaliterary reflection, Snow thus dramatizes the irreconcilability of worldliterature, national literature, and local political history. For David Damrosch, a literarytext fulfills three criteria if it is to become a work of world literature. 1) World literatureis an elliptical refraction of national literatures, 2) writing that gains in translation, 3) nota set canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worldsbeyond our own place and time. 55 He continues on to say that:Works become world literature by being received into the space of a foreign culture,a space defined in many ways by the host culture’s national tradition and the presentneeds of its own writers. The receiving culture can use the foreign material in allsorts of ways: as a positive model for the future development of its own tradition; asa negative case of a primitive or decadent strand that must be avoided or rooted outat home or, more neutrally, as an image of radical otherness against which the hometradition can more clearly be defined. 56What might be evident by this point is how oddly angled such novels as Snow andCaravanserai are toward this tripartite vision of world literature. The categories55 Damrosch 2003, 281.56 Damrosch 2003, 283.237

Damrosch proposes for describing world-literary exchange—“host culture,” “receivingculture,” “foreign material,” and “home tradition”—speak of mythical entities that thesetexts actively work to disarticulate.Under the provocative title What’s Left of Theory, Butler et al. reviewed whatpoststructural thought had meant for the reading of literature. The volume held that thebond between politics and textuality was, in fact, dyed in the wool of deconstruction—not tangential or adverse to it. While the authors invigorated this claim with essays onprivacy, secularism, pleasure, and “extreme criticism,” their recuperative gaze at thelegacy of deconstruction did not see fit to touch on the problem of linguistic multiplicityand monolingual foreclosure. Yet this seems a profoundly likely answer to the questionsthey pose: “What is our access to [the literary]? Upon what presuppositions aboutlanguage does literature and its criticism draw?” 57Yet the dilemma of multilingualism was one of the founding political impulses in theadvent of poststructural inquiry. Long before his memoir-essay Monolingualism of theOther, Derrida had introduced his 1989 lecture on “The Force of Law” with a concern forthe relation between monolingualism and justice:C’est ici un devoir, je dois m’adresser à vous en anglais. This is an obligation, I mustaddress myself to you in English. The title of this colloquium and the problem thatit requires me, as you say transitively in your language, to address, have had memusing for months. […] Je dois speak English (how does one translate this “dois”this “devoir? I must? I should, I ought to, I have to?)” because it has been imposed57 Judith Butler, John Guillroy, and Randall Thomas, Eds. What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politicsof Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 2000, x.238

on me as a sort of obligation or condition by a sort of symbolic force or law in asituation I do not control. 58In another context, Derrida wrote more explicitly about the kinship betweenmultilingualism and the post-structural project:I think [deconstruction] consists only of transference, and of a thinking through oftransference, in all the senses that this word acquires in more than one language, andfirst of all that of the transference between languages. If I had to risk a singledefinition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, Iwould say simply and without overstatement: plus d’une langue—more than onelanguage, no more of one language. 59Yet, over the course of the 1990s, as scholarly exchanges on ethics and justice in aDerridian mode unfurled, the dilemma of cross-lingual address and monolingual mandatewas afforded a primarily allegorical valence. Derrida’s introductory concern about“having to speak English” at Yeshiva University, for instance, was understood asmeaning something else, something more articulable to intellectual history’s canonicalpreoccupations. Thus one problem that is still “left of theory” is to reexamine thisspecific relation between monolingualism and logocentrism, between everydaymultilingualism and the ethics of deconstruction.58 Jacques Derrida. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation’ of Authority.” Trans. Mary Quaintance.Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Cardozo Law Review, 1990.59 Derrida 1986, 14–15.239

Given LanguageWhen the day of Pentecost came, they were alltogether in one place. Suddenly a sound like theblowing of a violent wind came from heaven andfilled the whole house where they were sitting.They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire thatseparated and came to rest on each of them. All ofthem were filled with the Holy Spirit and began tospeak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.Acts 2:1–4When you translate, you are part of the traffic.Probal Dasgupta 60Is it barking up the wrong tree—or worse yet, foul play—to look for multilinguality inliterature? Could it be that literary texts are, after all, better suited to give reprieve fromBabel’s curse than to represent it? In gathering readers from the most disparate ofcircumstances into “one house,” in coming toward them with “a sound like the blowingof a violent wind,” the monolingual text offers its deliberate and sculptedcomprehensibility: whether in the original or by way of Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui’sQuechua translation of Don Quixote, Ute Birgit-Knellessen’s German translations ofSabahattin Ali, or Qasim San'avi’s Persian translation of The Second Sex. In defiance ofall manner of cross-cultural and cross-lingual distances, the point—and the voice thatbears it—often manages to get across.Indeed, it is nothing but this lattice of translators, translated texts, and everydaymultilinguals that gave modernity that cultural artifact we call “the world.” A global webof air traffic controllers, code-breakers, snack-stand workers, actuaries, warcorrespondents, and schoolkids turn the cube of their own multilingual subjectivity—60 Probal Dasgupta. “Trafficking in Words: Languages, Missionaries and Translators.” Translation:Reflections, Refractions, Transformations. Paul St- Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar. Eds. Delhi: PencraftInternational, 2005. 42–56, 42.240

sometimes at great personal peril—to allow for what scholarly research now understandsas “global cultural flows.” The thousands of undercover multilinguals who translate forjournalists and officers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—even when doing so putstheir own extended families at daily risk—refreshes one’s sense for the volatile andcritical nature of multilingual position-taking. As Abram de Swaan writes at the outset ofhis ambitious treatment of “the world language system,”It is multilingulism that has kept humanity, separated by so many languages,together. The multilingual connections between language groups do not occurhaphazardly, but, on the contrary, they constitute a surprisingly strong and efficientnetwork that ties together—directly or indirectly—the six billion inhabitants of theearth. 61Yet this ancient and invisible fellowship of language traffickers—from Ibn Rushd andMaimonides to Borat and Ingrid Bettancourt—faces a new adversary in the free-tradeagendas of neoliberalism, where language “barriers” are as taboo as tariffs and tradesanctions. Private sector translation assembly lines are now beginning to outpace bothacademic research and international diplomacy in recognizing the voluble intersticesbetween particular languages—usually with an eye for deriving untapped capital gainfrom them.The emergence of GILT (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization,Translation) as an industry represents a collaboration, and not a confrontation, withinstitutional monolingualism. 62 In strategizing to customize cultural products to dovetailwith ambient national trends and local meanings, the GILT industry is out to soften the61 de Swaan 2000, 1.241

low of global multilingualism. In repackaging products and services so that they mightglisten with autochthony. GILT signals an industrial offensive against the Benjaminianlegacy of translation, in which the urgency of indexing difference outweighed thetemptation to domesticate signs and meanings.There is a stark resemblance between the industrialization of translating for allegedlymonolingual publics on the one hand and the “cosmopolitan monolingualism” ofimmigration policy discussed in the introductory chapter of this dissertation—a culture ofcivic patriotism in which fealty to the national language certifies one’s willingness toparticipate in a culturally diverse, constitutionally-anchored society—and vice-versa. Inthe first instance, GILT’s localization strategies presume preexisting and uniformmeanings in a given domestic market, euphemizing foreign products—film dialogue,food ingredients, internet commerce—toward those imagined norms. In the secondinstance, the ius linguarum of naturalization preemptively screens out variant andunincorporable ways of speaking from the language of public life. One process begets theother in making global capital exchange and flexible labor motility feel like an intimate,down-home affair. (Aihwa Ong points out how, in their “quest to accumulate capital andsocial prestige in the global arena, subjects emphasize, and are regulated by, practicesfavoring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments andcultural regimes.”) 63It is in the intersection of these two potent institutional streams that a “fear of amultilingual planet” is amply in evidence. Yet both GILT and the ius linguarum also63Aihwa Ong. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1999. 9.242

implicitly recognize—indeed it is their prime operating principle—that dominantlanguages are always already languages-in-translation. That is, they are routinely used,trafficked and altered in anational and transnational ways—leading apparentlyautochthonous meanings in wide elliptical arcs “through other continents” and back to thesignifying locations they were presumed never to have left in the first place. 64On what he has termed “given culture,” Pheng Cheah writes:Culture is supposed to be the realm of human freedom from the given. However,because human beings are finite natural creatures, the becoming-objective of cultureas the realm of human purposiveness and freedom depends on forces that areradically other and beyond human control. Culture is given out of these forces. 65As a corpus of philosophical fictions, the texts I have discussed in these chapters explorewhat might be called the “given language” beyond monolingualism—that is, thehelplessness—or perhaps Unmündigkeit—of institutions and individuals in achievingdominion over the ecologies of global language traffic, in attempting to compel the worldto turn monolingually. A critical vision of “given language” would recognize, and teachto, this precious finitude of the human speaker amid a universe of languages intranslation, traffic, and flight.64 Alestair Pennycook. “English as a Language always in Translation.” European Journal of EnglishStudies. 12.2 (2008). Wai Chi Dimock. Through Other Continents: American Literature Through DeepTime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.65Cheah 1997, 157–197.243

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