6. FERIDUN ZAIMOGLU ON „KANAKEN‟ 39 IN GERMANY
6.4 Conclusions
The other theme that Zaimoglu takes up again is that of interconnecting tales between Germans, Jews, and Turks. “Bist du ein Jude?” asks a prostitute in Hamburg‟s red light district around the Davidstrasse. “Nein, sagte ich, ganz normaler Deutscher.”
(Zaimoglu 2008: 113) Later, he meets Tyra, the woman he falls in love with, and introduces himself:
Ich bin David, sagte ich.
Du bist doch kein Deutscher, sagte sie.
Doch, ich bin eben etwas später dazugekommen.
Und hast einen deutschen Namen angenommen.
Nein, sagte ich, nur aus einem U ein I gemacht. (Zaimoglu 2008: 94)
These are the only direct references to the main protagonist‟s cultural identity and they are characterized by an insistence on personal integrity and a rejection of categories and definitive identities. Otherwise, the characterization of protagonists is plot-driven and insists on individual autonomy. This novel, therefore, aesthetically underlines Zaimoglu‟s themes and makes him a new writer whose literary roots are in migration literature and whose stories are increasingly difficult to describe in terms of traditional cultural associations.
The question of equality is an integral part of cultural diversity. Whereas South Africa emphasizes pluralism, cultural diversity and nation building, Germany‟s issues revolve around (im)migration, integration and a hegemonic versus minority culture. In both countries, the question of equality is at the core of managing diversity: In Germany, Zaimoglu and others (1998) wrote in a manifesto of their political action group Kanak Attak:
We support the fundamental human rights of all people yet at the same time are critical of notions of “equality” that mean the subordination of difference under one hegemonic culture. We seek to challenge this dominance of a hegemonic culture that ignores racial inequality – whether it is understood as
“global postmodernism” or a dull Teutonism. (Zaimoglu, Terkessidis et al.
1998: 260)
In an interview with the Mail and Guardian newspaper in South Africa, Chipkin (2007) says that the official version of what a South African is, “is not just about identity questions, but [has] also [to do with] the allocation of economic resources, economic policy, a vision of post-apartheid South Africa.” (Quoted in Do South Africans really exist? 2007, online document.)
Equally challenging as acknowledging and overcoming inequality, is striving for individual integrity. Chipkin (2007) says: “What I think is interesting is this idea that identity is a project of the self. The idea that one is working to produce one‟s own identity – it is not something given, it is not something imposed upon one.” (Quoted in Do South Africans really exist? 2007, online document.) This rather postmodernist view is echoed by Zaimoglu in a more militant way as a demand to allow individualism:
Es ist besonders in unseren Zeiten eine Binsenweisheit, dass kein Mensch mit einer strengen linearen Biographie aufwarten kann. Der Versuch, Einzelne wie Kollektive zugunsten vermeintlicher Erkenntnisgewinne zu vereinheitlichen, muss in einer Art Küchentischethnologie enden. Wer von Zusammenprall und Unverträglichkeit spricht, muss sich früher oder später mit dem Umstand
abfinden, dass die Konfliktlinien nicht zwischen den Kulturblöcken, sondern innerhalb der Kulturkreise verlaufen. (Zaimoglu 2001: 9)
Bhabha, similarly, suggests that “the threat of cultural difference is no longer a problem of „other‟ people. It becomes a question of otherness of the people-as-one”.
(Bhabha 2006: 215) Thinking along the lines of group identities within society is detrimental to the growth of individualism and especially hard on those individuals who depend on their ability to negotiate more than one culture to achieve personal integrity. The „demand to integration‟ is essentially a power claim. It does not assist those already living „between cultures‟ to move on to living „with cultures‟.
Individualism and personal integrity are, I believe, the driving forces of sustainable social transformation. Due to inherent inequality in culturally diverse environments, not all individuals are exposed to the same amount of pressure regarding their ability to negotiate between cultures. Those who are under pressure need to decide which of the new aspects to assimilate and what of the old to preserve. South African thinker Es‟kia Mphahlele (2004) offers an African perspective:
In every colonized person there are two selves: the indigenous (traditional) self and the other self imposed by the colonizer. The two come closer to each other and move away from each other by turns. The wise man tries to unite the two so as to create a unified self. We call this the integrated self. He thinks deeply about the combination so that he can understand himself better, where he comes from, where he is today and what has happened to him, and where he is going. Only when you have regained self-pride and reassembled the various elements of tradition and given them dignity, hallowed them, can you decide wisely which of the new values to throw out, which to appropriate or incorporate. (Mphahlele 2004: 284)
Zaimoglu‟s characters struggle more or less successfully to be „wise men‟ in Es‟kia‟s sense; the internal struggle of the colonized person (in (South) Africa) is not far removed from that of his „Kanaken‟ in today‟s Germany. Zaimoglu‟s „Kanaken‟ are the ideal new individuals who have invented themselves from what was available to them in both (or more) worlds. The reality is, of course, that the potential to assimilate
the „best of both worlds‟ remains an undefined ideal that many do not (want to) achieve. For Zaimoglu, the ideal is not perfectionism but the individual‟s striving for personal integrity. This means that s/he neither withdraws into grass root traditionalism nor allows her/himself to be drawn into complete assimilation of the new world with its inevitable possibility of rejection („Assimilkümmel‟). Both his books Leyla and Abschaum show that Zaimoglu neither removed himself from his roots nor ignored those who failed to adjust. His intellectual integrity saved him from the agony of Fanon‟s „acculturated elites‟:
In order to secure his salvation, the colonized intellectual feels the need to return to his unknown roots and lose himself, come what may, among his barbaric people. He finds himself bound to answer for everything and for everyone. This painful and harrowing wrench is, however, a necessity.
Otherwise we will be faced with extremely serious psycho-affective mutilations: individuals without an anchorage, without borders, colorless, stateless, rootless, a body of angels. (Fanon 2004: 157)
Striving for personal integrity has recently been less of a philosophical question;
young people are often more concerned with overcoming economic inequality.
Materialism and consumerism create the illusion that a quicker way can be found to create an identity for oneself. Spending money is certainly easier than struggling to position oneself in society and maintaining one‟s integrity. In his film Wut, Aldadag (2005) shows the Turkish youth to live parallel lives at home and on the street, lives between a traditionalist world and a materialist one which are often financed by crime.44 Nkuna (2006) writes that the South African youth in Johannesburg oscillates between the township world “which is dull” and The Zone45 which “represents an exciting new world that is hip, classy and multiracial”. (Nkuna 2006: 271):
[…] young people are actively trying to create a new multiracial identity. They are doing this on the basis of having fun together. Spending money is part of the game. It is a celebration of present prosperity and represents a moving on from old, politicized priorities. (Nkuna 2006: 262)
44 See also Fatih Akin‟s 1993 film Kurz und schmerzlos.
45„The Zone‟ is part of the Rosebank Shopping Mall in Johannesburg.
Often, this kind of materialism is little more than escapism from the underlying problems of social and economic inequality. Consumerism as the global equalizer is the postmodernist approach to cultural diversity and inequality. Gee (2005) argues that among the youth (his example being wealthy students and working class students) the wealth factor as a unifying concept should not be underestimated:
It has been argued that our new global capitalism is fast turning these two groups into separate “cultures” composed of people who share little or no “co- citizenship”. The wealthier group is coming progressively to feel more affiliation with similar elites across the world and less responsibility for the less well-off in their own country. (Gee 2005: 138)
It remains questionable, however, to what extent celebrating prosperity (real or imagined) can be a culturally unifying factor. In my opinion, the most important prerequisite for an intercultural understanding is the realization that intercultural people do not survive very well in societies that are either homogeneous or characterized by mere multicultural co-existence. The cultural heterogeneity of their background does not allow them to choose only one world. The world they create for themselves is a new one containing only fragments of the worlds surrounding them. A binary approach to social analysis such as the one underlying multiculturalism does not allow the formation of new worlds that supersede the old ones. It only preserves the old ones.
In a 2007 interview with Fathollah-Nejad, Zaimoglu said: “This whole ethnic crap gets on my nerves. And then people look at me if I say “German”! I know that over ninety per cent are thinking, “You look like what you look like. With your name?
Mate, with your face? No one but you is gonna believe that!” I couldn‟t care less about that. What‟s the one thing that matters? The way I see myself!” (Quoted in Fathollah-Nejad 2007, online document.)
As long as an underlying structure of opposition is assumed, it is of little consequence whether the attitudes of those in power are liberal or conservative. The conservative demand to one-sided integration may even be less confusing than a liberalism based
on distance tolerance and favouring the multicultural model of co-existence. In an interview following his film Wut, Aldadag (2005) commented on liberalism as an easy tolerance that survives at a distance and ends with the approach of „danger‟. Both the conservative and the liberal model are based on the „us‟ and „them‟ approach to cultural diversity. This approach perpetuates inequality as long as ethnicity is linked to social and economic opportunity. It also makes it impossible to ignore ethnic particularities as Zaimoglu demands.
The clash between those who understand new emergent cultures as crucially contributing to “transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces” (Bhabha 1994: 367), and those who aim to preserve the status quo (and have the political and economic power to do so) is central to the problem of cultural and social integration.