Although modern Germany is a multicultural and multireligious society, a fact reflected by the growing number of works on the lives of migrants to Germany by authors from non-German backgrounds, it is still difficult to find much scholarly study of the role of Islam in these works. Since 9/11 Islam has become a prime theme of German public discourse, yet still its presence as a topic of study in Germanistik remains rare. In an effort to provide a partial rectification of this situation this thesis examines Feridun Zaimoglu’s novel Leyla (2006) and the role that Islam plays in the story. One of the most well-known Turkish-German authors writing today, Feridun Zaimoglu has been in the public eye since the appearance of his first book Kanak Sprak – 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1995). Zaimoglu’s writings often focus on the lives of Turkish migrants and their children in Germany, yet Leyla is set completely in 1950s Turkey. The story follows the title figure as she grows up in a small Anatolian village which she eventually leaves for Istanbul and, at the very end of the novel, for Germany. Oppressed for most of her life by an abusive father, Leyla learns to chart her own course between traditional values and expectations and a more independent lifestyle. The thesis first establishes Islam’s heterogeneous character. Two perspectives of Islam, a patriarchal-traditional Islam and an enlightened Islam, are put forward as analytical frameworks for a nuanced interpretation of this complex novel. By applying the concept of the personal or inner jihad to the novel it is possible to establish that the novel presents a variety of versions or ways of Islam that are considered and confronted by the protagonist, and that this development on her part embodies the essential conflicts of the story. Leyla, who suffers from the oppression of a patriarchal form of Islam that has dominated the lives of her mother and siblings, gradually turns towards a more enlightened form of Islam that nevertheless retains features of traditional belief. The thesis contends that the novel’s complex exposition of Turkish society in the 1950s can be better understood when the novel’s relationship to the discourses of Islam are taken into account and employed as interpretive aids.

Although modern Germany is a multicultural and multireligious society, a fact reflected by the growing number of works on the lives of migrants to Germany by authors from non-German backgrounds, it is still difficult to find much scholarly study of the role of Islam in these works. Since 9/11 Islam has become a prime theme of German public discourse, yet still its presence as a topic of study in Germanistik remains rare. In an effort to provide a partial rectification of this situation this thesis examines Feridun Zaimoglu’s novel Leyla (2006) and the role that Islam plays in the story. One of the most well-known Turkish-German authors writing today, Feridun Zaimoglu has been in the public eye since the appearance of his first book Kanak Sprak – 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1995). Zaimoglu’s writings often focus on the lives of Turkish migrants and their children in Germany, yet Leyla is set completely in 1950s Turkey. The story follows the title figure as she grows up in a small Anatolian village which she eventually leaves for Istanbul and, at the very end of the novel, for Germany. Oppressed for most of her life by an abusive father, Leyla learns to chart her own course between traditional values and expectations and a more independent lifestyle. The thesis first establishes Islam’s heterogeneous character. Two perspectives of Islam, a patriarchal-traditional Islam and an enlightened Islam, are put forward as analytical frameworks for a nuanced interpretation of this complex novel. By applying the concept of the personal or inner jihad to the novel it is possible to establish that the novel presents a variety of versions or ways of Islam that are considered and confronted by the protagonist, and that this development on her part embodies the essential conflicts of the story. Leyla, who suffers from the oppression of a patriarchal form of Islam that has dominated the lives of her mother and siblings, gradually turns towards a more enlightened form of Islam that nevertheless retains features of traditional belief. The thesis contends that the novel’s complex exposition of Turkish society in the 1950s can be better understood when the novel’s relationship to the discourses of Islam are taken into account and employed as interpretive aids.

Wien, Univ., Dipl.-Arb., 2009.

Fifty years after large-scale Turkish labour migration to the Federal Republic of Germany began, theatre by Turkish-German artists is only now becoming a consistent feature of Germany’s influential state-funded theatrical landscape. So whilst much scholarship in recent years has focused on Turkish-German literature and film, very little research has been conducted into Turkish-German theatre. This doctoral thesis addresses this neglected field of study and examines contemporary theatre practice and theatrical representation in the Federal Republic of Germany as a country of immigration. It traces the fascinating fates of five plays by two Turkish-German playwrights who are already well-known for their award-winning prose work: Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu, who writes for the stage with Günter Senkel. The thesis focuses on these plays in performance and examines the dramatic and performance texts’ negotiations of 1) mimesis – the artistic representation of ‘the real’ – and 2) mimeticism – a mechanism identified by cultural theorist Rey Chow as relying on Platonic concepts of idealised ‘originals’ to keep certain subjects ‘in their place’. The thesis argues that Özdamar’s plays in production function as touchstones for thinking through broader tendencies in the German theatrical establishment’s inclusion of theatre by, with, and concerning Turkish-Germans, while Zaimoglu/Senkel’s reveal points at which these paradigms shift. The earliest production which the thesis examines, Özdamar’s Karagöz in Alamania, was premiered in 1986, and the most recent, Özdamar’s Perikızı, in 2011. The intervening years are marked by the examination of Zaimoglu/Senkel’s Othello (2003), Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006), and Schattenstimmen (2008). As theatrical production in Germany is a process which tends to take the play out of the author’s hands, the thesis aims to unpack the negotiations between text and performance, author and director, ensemble and audience in each production. In doing so it makes use of extensive field and archival work. For each play addressed, the thesis moves beyond the dramatic text to draw on a wide range of sources including audiovisual recordings, prompt scripts, programmes, and interviews with the directors and authors. This historicising approach to performance analysis allows connections to be made between the performances as historical events taking place within an institutional context and the negotiations of mimesis and mimeticism within the mise-en-scène of each play in its world premiere and beyond. Key questions addressed throughout include: in what context were these plays staged? How were migration and migrant or postmigrant figures represented within them? How were productions received? And what does this have to tell us about cultural production and aesthetics within the very particular circumstances created by twentieth-century Turkish migrations to Germany? A focus on ‘mimeticism’ allows this thesis to explore the ways in which the productions examined approached the representation of ‘ethnicised’ figures. It also reveals the extent to which a positioning of plays by Özdamar and Zaimoglu/Senkel as ‘Turkish’, ‘Turkish-German’, or ‘postmigrant’ may also have affected their production and reception. A complementary focus on ‘mimesis’ then allows this thesis to examine the degree to which these performances were intended or received as aesthetic interventions relevant to the social reality of contemporary Germany. Indeed, the trajectories which this thesis traces over the past quarter of a century see Turkish- German theatre move not only geographically, but also symbolically, from the margins to the centre of theatrical life in contemporary Germany. Rather than seeing this relatively late success as reason to obscure earlier Turkish-German theatrical productions, this study places that success in context. It thus highlights the role which Özdamar's and Zaimoglu/Senkel's ‘script[s] of multiculturalism’ (B. Venkat Mani) have played in a larger, ongoing re-scripting of the German stage, which has taken place as Germany adjusts to its status as a country of immigration.

The label ‘Muslim’ is increasingly being used to exclude migrants and non-ethnic Germans from German society. Although this process began after 2000 when Germany’s citizenship laws changed from jus sanguinis to incorporate an element of jus soli and minority subjects could no longer be ‘othered’ by their passports alone, it intensified shortly afterwards due to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (Spielhaus 2006). Specifically within the German context, the discovery that Mohamed Atta, one of the perpetrators of 9/11, had lived and studied in Hamburg, the foiled bomb plots of 2006 and 2007, and the 2011 Frankfurt Airport shooting all served to buttress this paradigmatic shift from national/ethnic difference to religious. Yet, rather than responding in kind to this identitarian entrenchment, the work of Zafer Şenocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu and Navid Kermani (all minority writers of varying Muslim backgrounds) suggests new ways of thinking about community, identity and religiosity that are fluid, non-foundational and open to an undecided future, which can all be illuminated by Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of the ‘inoperative community’ (2000 and 1991) and the deconstruction of monotheism (2008).For Nancy, the traditional understanding of community as the fusion of immanent individuals with a common identity must be resisted, as this disguises our actual ontological interrelatedness as ‘singular beings’ who are radically open to one another. This non-foundational approach regards the spacing of interconnected singular beings (their ‘being-in-common’) as the sense of the world, and rejects universalising ideologies that seek to confer sense upon the world from the outside, since these act to close down meaning and divide us up into polarised communities. In Nancy’s terms, whether these ideologies be political or religious, they are both defined by the monotheistic paradigm that operates through a separate ideal world that acts as our world’s guiding principle. This is why Nancy himself rejects the term cosmopolitanism, as its philosophical roots in the metaphysics of the Enlightenment stem from the ideal world of pure Reason. Nevertheless, just as the inoperative community can be understood as a non-foundational route to cosmopolitan solidarities, the deconstruction of monotheism too leaves space for a non-foundational religiosity that resists traditional identities and symbolism. Nancy proposes, borrowing from mysticism, a God not as ‘the “other world” [...], but the other of the world’ (2008, p. 10), that is to say, a religiosity that does not position God as the subject of the world and its organizing principle, but concerns itself instead with glimpsing the divine in the alterity in our world, which results from the very nothingness of its origins. These arguments, that I place at the forefront of post-9/11 debates surrounding cosmopolitanism and religion, can shed light on the literary writing of Şenocak, SAID, Zaimoglu and Kermani, who draw upon the immanentist tradition within Islamic mysticism in order to intimate a non-identitarian religiosity that figures in the alterity of the world and leaves open all possibilities for the future. In this regard, their fiction hints at an affective and worldly spirituality that can be found in love, sex, music and the natural world, which, whilst also serving to dispel stereotypical associations between Islam and sexual conservatism, hints at a post-monotheistic religiosity beyond identity and ideology. Thus, rather than creating a homogenous foundation through dialogue (the approach of the German state and often of interkultureller Germanistik), the non-foundational and cosmopolitan conceptualisations of the self, community and religiosity found in the writing of these authors both undermine the closed identities that are clashing violently across the globe at the start of the twenty-first century and also open up the space for us to imagine new ways of coexisting.

The central concern of this thesis is to describe the views of the young men in Feridun Zaimoglus book Kanak Sprak (2000) on their own identity ("Kanaken"), on the identity of other foreigners such as (college "Ali") and the Germans ("Alemannen") with help of close-reading. The book contains short-stories or "protocolls", written in the special language "KanakSprak", a mixture of Turkish and German street gang slang. There are claims that Zaimoglus texts are written based on hiphop/rap language. The categories in this work are identity, youth(sub)culture, territory, style and Hiphop. Other than close-reading the analysis will also take help of different research areas such as youth research and soliology.

The topic of dissertation is the view and the understanding of term ?love? in Turkish-German coexistence. The dissertation is divided into two main sections. The first one contains general information about life of Turks in Germany. The history-overview of migration to Germany precedes this description. In the theoretical section there is also described the meaning of intercultural life, intercultural literature and intercultural movie. This section is based especially on the studied literature. The second section of dissertation includes analysis of literature work and movie from the view of characters-characteristic and their understanding of term ?love?. Also we can find here the description, how each character copes with the feeling ?to be in love?. The goal of the dissertation is to show intercultural life in the context of the basic human feeling?in the context of love.

Thesis -- Departmental honors in German. / Bibliography: ℓ. 94-104.