THIS BOOK CHARTS DEVELOPMENTS in Turkish German literature since the 1970s, particularly the shift from a “literature of migration” toward a “literature of settlement.” The focus is on the work of novelists, since the novel has unique force as a vehicle of public expression in Western and Westernized literary cultures. But the book does not only concern weighty fiction, it encompasses light fiction, too. The subtitle, Cosmopolite Fictions, intends to suggest “polite fictions”: euphemisms, or convenient falsehoods, which are legion in this field of literature, criticism, and social commentary, but we will also encounter a good deal of impolite fiction.

Writing about Turkish Germany involves tragic stories, but also comedy, and even farce. Ludicrous misunderstandings come with the territory. In 1998, I attended a conference in Stuttgart on so-called “Ausländerliteratur” (non-native literature), where I was introduced to the grande dame of this specialization, Irmgard Ackermann. Without preliminaries, she asked me: “Wie finden Sie diese Literatur?” — “How do you find this literature?” Surprised that she should be interested in my opinion, I began to frame a cautious reply. She cut me off: “Nein, wie finden Sie diese Literatur?” She meant: how do you identify the writers who write in German, but who are not Germans? How does one locate this literature, how does one collect it?

The sheer quantity of imaginative writing in German, published by people who are ancestrally and ethnically not German, constantly rises.