Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: New German-Language Writing since the Turn of the Millennium
- 1 Ulrike Draesner, Mitgift: On Bodies and Beauty
- 2 Vladimir Vertlib, Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur: Performing Jewishness in the New Germany
- 3 Terézia Mora, Alle Tage: Transnational Traumas
- 4 Juli Zeh, Spieltrieb: Contemporary Nihilism
- 5 Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt: Measuring Celebrity through the Ages
- 6 Clemens Meyer, Als wir träumten: Fighting “Like a Man” in Leipzig’s East
- 7 Saša Stanišić, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert: Reinscribing Bosnia, or: Sad Things, Positively
- 8 Ilija Trojanow, Der Weltensammler: Separate Bodies, or: An Account of Intercultural Failure
- 9 Sibylle Berg, Die Fahrt: Literature, Germanness, and Globalization
- 10 Julia Franck, Die Mittagsfrau: Historia Matria and Matrilineal Narrative
- 11 Alina Bronsky, Scherbenpark: Global Ghetto Girl
- 12 Karen Duve, Taxi: Of Alpha Males, Apes, Altenberg, and Driving in the City
- 13 Yadé Kara, Cafe Cyprus: New Territory?
- 14 Sven Regener, Der kleine Bruder: Reinventing Kreuzberg
- 15 Kathrin Schmidt, Du stirbst nicht: A Woman’s Quest for Agency
- Appendices Samples of Contemporary German-Language Novels in Translation
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
13 - Yadé Kara, Cafe Cyprus: New Territory?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: New German-Language Writing since the Turn of the Millennium
- 1 Ulrike Draesner, Mitgift: On Bodies and Beauty
- 2 Vladimir Vertlib, Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur: Performing Jewishness in the New Germany
- 3 Terézia Mora, Alle Tage: Transnational Traumas
- 4 Juli Zeh, Spieltrieb: Contemporary Nihilism
- 5 Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt: Measuring Celebrity through the Ages
- 6 Clemens Meyer, Als wir träumten: Fighting “Like a Man” in Leipzig’s East
- 7 Saša Stanišić, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert: Reinscribing Bosnia, or: Sad Things, Positively
- 8 Ilija Trojanow, Der Weltensammler: Separate Bodies, or: An Account of Intercultural Failure
- 9 Sibylle Berg, Die Fahrt: Literature, Germanness, and Globalization
- 10 Julia Franck, Die Mittagsfrau: Historia Matria and Matrilineal Narrative
- 11 Alina Bronsky, Scherbenpark: Global Ghetto Girl
- 12 Karen Duve, Taxi: Of Alpha Males, Apes, Altenberg, and Driving in the City
- 13 Yadé Kara, Cafe Cyprus: New Territory?
- 14 Sven Regener, Der kleine Bruder: Reinventing Kreuzberg
- 15 Kathrin Schmidt, Du stirbst nicht: A Woman’s Quest for Agency
- Appendices Samples of Contemporary German-Language Novels in Translation
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
WINNER OF THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE 2004 for most successful debut novel for Selam Berlin (2003), which also earned her the 2004 Adelbert-von-Chamisso Förderpreis (promotional prize), Yadé Kara is a commercially successful Turkish-German writer. Kara, a “staunch West Berliner,” who had a diverse career as a journalist, actress, teacher and manager in four metropolises before becoming a writer, was born in Çayırlı, eastern Anatolia, in 1965 and moved to Germany with her parents as a child. In her thoughtful and at times critical Chamisso Prize acceptance speech, she compares her coming to Germany and her identity as a Berliner to Adelbert von Chamisso’s circumstances, writing:
As a child, Adelbert left France and fled the French Revolution; I left Turkey as a child and fled Anatolian earthquakes.
We both came to Berlin. Adelbert lived at the castle as a page to Queen Friederike Luise; I lived a few streets away from the castle in a typical old Berlin building.
He learnt to read, write, and speak German at the Prussian Court; I learnt at a West Berlin elementary school.
Kara belongs to the “second generation” of Turkish-German women writers, and her work has enjoyed popular success while developing a distinctive style that sets her apart from many of her contemporaries, not least in the work’s narration through a male protagonist. I will argue that despite these differences, however, her work, and in particular her second novel, Cafe Cyprus (2008), forms part of a new trend of (female) Turkish-German writers whose texts are reterritorialized on ideological concepts such as religion, family, and nation. While the majority of these authors focus on peppy, entertaining, yet ultimately orientalizing narratives of “harmless” Turkish-German family lives, for Yadé Kara reterritorialization takes the form of a very concrete notion of identity politics, mouthed by characters in her work, and jarring in the mouth of the supposedly apolitical narrator Hasan, who in Selam Berlin seemed more inclined toward description than programmatic statement. This reterritorialization is even more developed in Cafe Cyprus, set in London in the early 1990s, than in Selam Berlin, set in Berlin between the fall of the Wall and reunification; Cafe Cyprus thus presents an interesting response to citizenship debates in early twenty-first-century Germany.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century , pp. 195 - 213Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011