TURKISH GERMAN WRITING IS A FAST-MOVING TARGET. Before this book appears, new works of fiction, some by new writers, will have changed the picture. By way of preliminary conclusion, this section briefly discusses some recent novels that focus on the premigration past, both in Germany and in Turkey. They testify to the increasing importance attached to constructing a history for the Turkish settlement that reaches back beyond the mass migrations of the 1960s. A controversy surrounding one of them indicates the baleful effects of cultural-political scrutiny in the guise of literary criticism.

Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds (The Smith's Daughter, 2005) and Feridun Zaimoglu's Leyla (2006) are novels about Anatolian small-town family life, set in the decades preceding the guest worker migrations. Both writers focus on female figures and pay tribute to their elders as migrant pioneers. Zaimoglu's novel is closely based on his mother's audiotaped life story. Both novels chronicle the modernization of provincial life, which leads to increasing economic ambitions. Both heroines migrate to Germany in the books' closing pages to join husbands who have gone ahead. Thus the novels cover the territory of Emine Sevgi Özdamar's first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei … (1992) (except that she did not go to Germany to join a man). The two recent novels do not attempt anything like Özdamar's hybrid, literally translated style, or her faux-naif, paratactic, narrative form. They take the conventional form of the family saga. Özdogan narrates in the third person from the heroine’s viewpoint, Zaimoglu in the first person, and they use different versions of standard realist prose.