This essay suggests an alternative to the usual practice of categorising migrant writers by generation, in order to counter the teleological tendency in some recent commentaries on German-Turkish writing, which celebrate the youngest writers as the most 'advanced'. Instead I put forward the idea that different writers (and writers at different stages in their careers) adopt different strategies in order to cope with the 'burden of representation' which is imposed on them as migrant/minority artists by the public. I survey German-Turkish novelists, outlining a tentative typology of such strageies. 'Axial writing' (directly thematising migrant experience) is the commonest, and has many sub-varieties, but the alternatives are just as interesting.

This essay explores German-Turkish novelists' responses to the burdens of representation imposed by being a German-Turkish novelist. Writers and critics alike often resort to metaphors of the circus and gymnastics - tightrope-walking, doing the splits, balancing acts - to convey the position of artists of hyphenated national/ethnic identity. In the German-Turkish context, these metaphors of performance can be alternatives to the predominant 'bridge' imagery, querying its architectural rigidity. 'Juggling' might seem unwarrantedly playful, in a time of intensifying conflict over multiculturalism, migration, and relations between the West and the rest. But perhaps the most valuable achievement of the most interesting hyphenated writers - and others - who tackle these issues is to enable us to discuss them with less of a grimace of liberal guilt, less straining for political correctness, less anxiety about giving offence. A few years ago in Marbach, at a function marking the hand-over of the Chamisso Prize collection of books and manuscripts to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, I was introduced to Irmgard Ackermann as a Germanist from Wales who was interested in 'hyphenated German' writers. Without preliminaries, she asked me: 'Und wie finden Sie sie?" I began to say that I thought that some were very interesting - but she interrupted me: 'Nein, ich meine, wie finden Sie sie?' It was the question of a collector. As it happened, I had picked up a free brochure from a bookshop that morning, with a feature article on 'deutschschreibende Migrantinnen', mentioning a couple of names new to both of us. There's no substitute for serendipity, we agreed. But our misunderstanding highlights the perversity of the professional multiculturalist's quest for minority expression. This is also illustrated by the debacle over Jakob Arjouni, still widely believed to be an authentic Turk himself, though he is no more Turkish than Sten Nadolny. Disputes continue in connection with the Chamisso Prize and other public events, over criteria for inclusion which presume and perpetuate symbolic exclusion, and over the practice of literally pinning badges on writers which define their identity in terms of parental nationality. Ways of being a Turkish-identified, Germany-based writer have naturally changed over time. Pioneer migrants writing Turkish and acquiring German have seen their children and grandchildren grow up and be educated in Germany, in most cases acquiring little or no Turkish literacy. It is understandably commonplace to categorise 'Turkish writers of German tongue' and 'German writers of Turkish name' by generation. This stresses divisions between the earlier 'exilic' writers on the one hand, and the later 'diasporic' writers on the other - here I loosely follow the terminology used by Hamid Naficy of a different displaced group, Iranians in the United States, and a different form of cultural production, film. I will start by reviewing this by now standard approach to the periodisation of German-Turkish writing, referring to a short and superficial survey by Joan Kristin Bleicher, chosen for its symptomatic value. Bleicher uses three headings: 'Die Gastarbeiterliteratur der ersten Generation: Opferliteratur'; 'Die zweite Generation: Bestseller der "In-Länder"'; 'Die dritte Generation: Kanak Attak'. The first roughly corresponds to Naficy's 'exilic': this is work which is essentially directed towards the country of origin, as indexed above all by use of the 'homeland' language, and by engagement in political and/or aesthetic debates taking place there. The bulk of 'Gastarbeiterliteratur' and 'Deutschlandliteratur', sometimes produced by labour migrants but more often by other migrants, documenting working and living conditions, was primarily addressed to Turkish readers, though in some cases translated into German - and writing and publishing in German was directly encouraged from the early 1980s under the 'patronage' of the 'dominant culture'. This phase is retrospectively castigated as 'Opferliteratur' by Bleicher and other younger writers in Germany today. The failure of all such writing, including the most aesthetically ambitious and least homeland-oriented work (Bleicher mentions the Poli-Kunst group, Aras Ören, Franco Biondi, Gino Chiellino), to gain significant attention within the German public sphere is summed up by the enduring status of Günther Wallraff's Ganz unten (1985) as the canonical account of Gastarbeiter experience in public memory and in German Studies. In a second stage of demographic development, what can be called 'ethnic' writing represents a self-conscious minority as it becomes more socially differentiated and stakes cultural claims in the public sphere of the 'host' country. In Germany, the 'minority' in question may be defined in terms of specific ethnic, national or religious identity (e.g. Turks, Kurds, Moslems, Alevites), or in terms of difference from the German majority: the minority of 'Ausländer' (whose negative 'ethnic' commonality lies in not being German). 'Ethnic writing' arguably corresponds to much of the fiction, poetry, drama and testimony (etc.) written in German as a second language, or as a first (literary) language, in the 1980s and after. Primarily addressed to German readers, in a few cases such work has achieved considerable public impact. Bleicher's subtitle refers implicitly to the testimony of the Green politician Cem Özdemir. She names Akif Pirinçci, Arjouni (!), Rafik Schami, Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and (again) Biondi as writers who forged new kinds of connection between migrant experiences and German readers, establishing people of non-German minority origin as genuine co-citizens in the public sphere of cultural production. Of these, in Bleicher's account, Özdamar is the one who points forward to a third phase, which can also be called 'diasporic' writing, though she references the specific, rather narrow 'school' of 'Kanak Attak' around Feridun Zaimoglu. 'Diasporic' writing can be said to develop out of 'ethnic' writing, taking wider perspectives: it explores or forges connections between a given minority and other minorities, past and present, in Germany and other countries, drawing on postcolonial thinking in order to deconstruct the stereotypes of 'self' and 'other' which erect boundaries and damage communication between minorities and majorities generally. In Germany, this corresponds to the stylistically and formally innovative work of certain writers since the late 1980s, chiefly (in Bleicher's account) Özdamar and Zaimoglu, and with them Jewish writers including Rafael Seligmann, Lea Fleischmann and Esther Dischereit. Bleicher claims that this kind of 'Kanak' writing connects multi-minority political issues with broader social movements through a radically individualist subversion of German literary language, representing its untranslated contamination by other languages, and hence the 'Nebeneinander' of multicultural (and, one might add, globalised) society. Setting aside the many hasty omissions and errors in Bleicher's account (the mis-spelling of Schami and the peculiar placement of Tawada being among the most obvious), the placing of several names under two headings suffices to show that this teleological model fails to fit the literary historical facts. The notion of progress from a 'backward-looking' phase, through a phase of community development in the new national context, towards participation in transnational avant-garde movements (Özdamar being to Gloria Anzaldúa what Zaimoglu is to Irvine Welsh) can only be an extremely crude heuristic device. For all the nuances in the presentation, a similar idea of forwards movement underpins the progression 'from Pappkoffer to pluralism', in Fischer and McGowan's seminal survey of 1995, implicitly presenting Özdamar's as the most advanced writing practice of a Turk in German so far. The passage from Dursun Akçam's Deutsches Heim / Alman Ocagi (1982) to Zaimoglu's Kanak Sprak (1995), described by me in 2002 as marking moments in the ongoing 'arrival' of Turks in Germany, is another example of the teleological approach. The dangers in such a perspective include the over-emphatic celebration of the latest work on the scene, and the over-hasty burial of what went before. The diversity of both past and current forms of writing resists a unilinear narrative approach. And paradoxically, a division by generations, within a framework of successive advance, risks masking a quite fundamental generational, or perhaps 'socialisational' rupture: the gulf between actual migrants, whose writing is based in an early life in a non-German language and landscape, and those who have (nearly) always lived in Germany. The latter are commonly still referred to (and even refer to themselves) as 'MigrantInnen', but many have had little or no experience of their 'other culture' - except in the peculiar conditions of diaspora. Indeed, Chiellino has argued that there is no 'second generation'. The bilingual, intercultural aesthetic developed by migrant writers and theorists like him can find no heirs among those born and bred in Germany, who are to all intents and purposes creatures of German culture alone (albeit an ever more transnationally hybridised or bastardised German culture). Here I put forward a tentative non-chronological, non-teleological categorisation of work by Turkish-identified, Germany-based novelists and novels, sorting them with reference to the implied mode of response to the cultural-political problem of representation. This problem is posed by the German socio-cultural and political context in which the writers find themselves. To be identified as Turkish and/or to identify oneself as Turkish, in Germany, is to carry a 'burden of representation' analogous to that carried by, say, black writers in white-majority countries, or (nominally) Muslim writers in (nominally) Christian countries. To speak of such a 'burden' means to raise at least two problems which others create for you. First, you are assumed to speak for all those who are assumed to belong to the category to which you are assumed to belong. Second, those who assume that they belong to the same category as you, want you to depict all 'our' people in what they deem to be a positive light. 'Women writers', 'feminist writers' and 'gay and lesbian writers' are familiar with the syndrome, but at present it is especially intense around issues of 'race' and religion. In Germany, Turkishness is often regarded (on all sides) as a 'Schandfleck' comparable with the ineradicable difference of being Jewish. The only possible escape lies in (renewed) exile. But the burden of representing 'Turks' to 'Germans' under the eyes of 'German Turks' is only part of the problem. In my title, the burdens are plural, because to be a writer in Germany of Turkish background or descent is not only to be expected to represent the Turkish minority. It is also to share (potentially) the burden of representation carried by all German writers in the international arena: the burden of representing Germany and Germans. All writers wish to be translated, if only for the financial rewards. Writers of literary ambition tend to be particularly keen to achieve international recognition. And this entails representing German culture abroad. It also entails representing 'Turkish culture in German society' abroad. But even that is not all. Inasmuch as Turkish-German writers tend to be specifically interested in their reception in Turkey, they are also called upon to represent the Turkish diaspora back in the Turkish homeland. And furthermore, as this diaspora grows - in North America, in Australasia, as well as in western Europe - it is developing a profile as a self-conscious global network, and as a component of multifarious national or metropolitan multiculturalisms. Travelling Turkish-German writers increasingly find that they also represent this protean, global social entity too, in as many settings as they encounter, or wherever the Goethe-Institut, their publishers and other sponsors send them. How is a writer to respond to these pressures, which multiply and intensify the more widely one is read? They are of course only partly specific to the literary arena. The self-contradictory mixture of exclusion and compulsory assimilation practised by the German state and public institutions towards immigrants 'shapes the acculturation of ethnic minorities, and their strategies in response'. Three main strategies are outlined by Ertugrul Uzun: 'integration, ethnic isolationism and denial of ethnic identity' (where the last may take the form of 'passing' under a less stigmatised ethnic identity, such as Italian, or substituting for Turkish identity a subnational or religious identity). Novelists, by virtue of their public role as representatives and their participation in the publishing and cultural industries, can really only opt for some variant of 'integration'. But what does that mean? I will briefly outline, with examples, four basic strategies, four ways in which writers deal with the burdens of representation and thereby explore - in their work and otherwise in their public lives - the meanings of integration. I call these strategies: 1. Axialism; 2. Refusal; 3. Parodic ethnicisation; 4. Glocalism. It will rapidly become clear that these are not mutually exclusive strategies, one or other of which a given writer adopts as a fixed stance. Rather, they are possibilities immanent in their situation, and most oscillate between them. As this is a short overview, I cannot avoid summarily pigeon-holing writers and novels under one or another of these headings. More detailed analyses would need to show how individual texts or bodies of work exemplify several strategies or all of them. 'Axialism' is an obscure term for the most obvious phenomenon. It means a consciously performed exploration, even exploitation, of the axes of identity and difference - nationality, 'race', ethnicity, religion, place, class, gender and so on. These axialities are foregrounded in the self-awareness of migrant subjects (writers and others) under the pressure of majority perception of their 'abnormality', their deviant 'hybridity' or 'exterritoriality'. The notion of the 'axial writer' was coined some years ago by a research group based at University of Wales Swansea. It specifically refers to travelling writers whose lives are lived on, and whose work chronicles the traffic on, the geographical (but also remembered and imagined) pathways of mass migration: Germany-Turkey, Germany-Portugal, Britain-Jamaica-New York, Britain-India-East Africa, France-the Maghreb, France-Egypt, and so forth. Here, however, I intend 'axialism' to refer not so much to a way of life (the writer who physically 'divides her time between ...') as to an intention of cultural translation underlying the work. (As a matter of fact many of the writers in question do divide their time between Germany and Turkey, and/or have spent different periods of their lives in each country.) The axialist writer willingly - albeit in most cases not uncomplainingly - assumes the burdens of representation, in a more or less pedagogical spirit. Her or his task is to examine the issues and conflicts arising from migration and remigration, past and present, and to represent minority experience both in order to foster minority self-awareness and to improve understanding among majorities. One of the intentions and one of the effects of the writing is to help (for example) Germans, Turks, and German Turks or Turkish Germans to understand one another better. The vast bulk of texts by German-Turkish writers clearly belong to this broad category. They take particular migrant and minority experiences as their starting-point and encourage reflection on the typicality and atypicality of such experiences, as implicitly measured against a supposed norm within the mass of such experience. Indeed it is arguably the establishment of a positive norm, in contrast to the generally known demeaning stereotypes - hence the normalisation or destigmatisation of migration and of ethnic difference - that is eventually the aim of such writing. The danger is that common assumptions about homogeneous 'identities' and essentialised 'differences' remain untouched. This kind of work lends itself to being harnessed for the civic rites of state-sponsored multiculturalism, and is eagerly promoted by publishers. Many 'hybrid' writers are able to describe how publishers, critics and commentators demand just such axialist work from them, since this is the kind of writing that fulfils public expectations of 'minority' writers. Work which fails to conform to these expectations is rejected or ignored. Yet despite these complaints, many writers also recognise that these expectations enable them to exploit the specific 'exotic' cultural capital which they owe to their migrancy or hybridity, bringing opportunities which are not open to monocultural writers. This in turn, though, makes axialist writers a target for accusations of positive discrimination, or tokenism, when it comes to prizes, stipends and the like, undermining their individual and collective sense of achievement and social validation. Even more frequently, they complain of being read solely for their sociological content, without regard to their aesthetic ambitions. This is precisely because their subject matter - those axes of identity and difference - is regarded as being so socially and politically contentious that most readers' first interest is to know what they have to say about it, rather than paying much attention to how they say it. In fact it is possible to categorise any work by any hybrid writer under this term, if only because a sufficiently suspicious reading can find metaphors of border-crossing, difference, displacement and cultural dissonance in any text. After all, this is the common currency of international modernism and postmodernism, and so it is equally possible to categorise all sorts of writing by 'non-hybrid' writers as 'axialist'. But among German-Turkish novelists, several fall squarely into this category. Aras Ören (writing in Turkish, but more read in German) chronicles the social history of the Turkish diaspora in Germany, using playful postmodernist techniques to subvert any substantive notions of identity, but remaining strictly true to the specific migrant milieu of his personal experience. Güney Dal (again writing in Turkish, but read more in German) in most of his works explores the same milieu and the same problematics of displacement, exile, and non- or mis-communication between migrants and natives. Emine Sevgi Özdamar (writing in mildly Turkished German) fictionalises an autobiography marked by repeated transits between Turkey and the two Germanies. A story like Zafer Senocak's 'Fliegen' is almost an axialist manifesto, focusing tightly on the trajectory between Germany and Turkey and the traffic on that axis. His sequence of novels investigates identity crises in protagonists strung between Germany and the USA, between Germanness, Turkishness and Jewishness, or between Berlin and fantasy geographies of the 'Orient'. All these works offer much more than axialism, but axialism is central to them, providing a framework, a set of reference points, even a raison d'être. Less 'literary' novelists like Renan Demirkan, Alev Tekinay and Dilek Zaptçioglu deploy the generic frameworks of family saga, intercultural romance or detective fiction in migrant milieux to explore xenophobic prejudice: axialism tout court. What then are the alternatives to axialism? Arguably, as I have indicated, there are no alternatives, only sub-categories of axialism. But there are three ways in which different sets of novelists, in and since the 1980s, have sought to escape the restrictions of the axialist role. The first I call 'refusal'. As it happens, the first novel published by a German-Turkish writer writing in German, Akif Pirinçci's Tränen sind immer das Ende (1980), was formulaic axialism: an ill-starred intercultural romance. But since this apprentice piece, Pirinçci has determinedly avoided the axial thematics of migration, producing a series of fat fantasy potboilers, several of which have sold very well in many languages, making him reputedly Germany's wealthiest writer. Crossing borders, learning new languages, ghettoisation, negotiating between conflicting parental and peer cultures, disjunctive national and diaspora and minority histories, and other stock themes of axialism, do not figure at all. Pirinçci is perhaps not interested or does not care, or more likely he transmutes such issues into the startling donnés of his popular plots: a cat detective uncovering an evil eugenicist's plot; a limbless, bed-bound criminal mastermind; a world in which men are extinct; and so on. With slight effort, these plots can be read as referring obliquely to the migrant situation: the impaired and emasculated male, the intended victim of Herrenrasse fantasies. But such anxieties are far from being unique to migrants. Pirinçci owes his success to avoiding what is expected of a writer with a name like his in Germany, and has thereby liberated not only himself from the burden of representation, but potentially other writers too. A second refuser - for the most part - is Selim Özdogan. He has not travelled so well, and his success (though remarkable) is on a smaller scale: his work appeals to a fairly narrow 'twens' segment of the German reading market, but here he is treated as a cult author. Most of his writing is superficially (or pseudo-) autobiographical, recording the trials and tribulations of being a young man in Germany, in seemingly casual, effortlessly 'cool', confessional prose. Specifically ethnic dimensions of his experience are marginal. In many of his books, the only reference to his Turkish background is constituted by his name. Other books supply the occasional anecdote of early life in Turkey, or refer to Turkish friends in Germany who (were) failed at school and now exist on the dole, or there are references to prejudicial responses to the narrator's skin and hair colour. But Özdogan's long-term adolescent narrator, usually called Selim, is far too engrossed in pondering the meaning of life in the style of a less cynical Holden Caulfield, giving us the benefit of his thoughts about sex, drugs and drink, consumerism, or New Age ideas, and writing about becoming a writer, while comprehensively ignoring contemporary political and social concerns, to dwell on his identity in terms of transnational and ethnic difference. As his publicity says: 'Immer dreht es sich um das Leben: Musik, Spass und Liebe, miese Jobs, Stress und Streit und wie man damit klarkommt ohne seine Seele zu verkaufen...'. The most recent novel chronicles a Mediterranean holiday with lashings of explicit sex, and ends with a coda in which hero and heroine return to the same resort a couple of years later with their daughter. What we had thought was conventional lusty pornography turns out to be conventional heterosexual romance. But all this has absolutely nothing to do with 'representing Turkish identity' - except insofar as this young Turkish man wants to be seen as differing in no significant way from young men of any other nationality or ethnicity. At most, it is suggested that his hybrid identity confers on him a natural cosmopolitanism, so that he can look down on the narrow-minded monoculturals he encounters. These writers' chief contribution is to have liberated themselves and others from the burdens of representation, by writing eminently marketable books that refuse to engage with questions of identity and difference in the established terms of debates on multiculturalism. A second response to axialism, and our third category, takes the opposite direction. 'Parodic ethnicisation' takes the ascriptions of ethnic characteristics found in the discourse of multiculturalism to an extreme, representing minorities as constituting a compound ethnicity whose characteristics consist in being exactly what the majority dreads them to be, or despises them for being. This strategy is grounded in the perception that the interpellation of 'migrants' and 'minorities' as such, therefore as deviant and a threat to the integrity of the presumed 'national culture', underlies the discourse of 'multiculturalism', 'identity' and 'diversity', let alone 'integration' and 'assimilation'. Rather than work within such discourse - as axialism does - or reject it, and speak of other things, as the refusers do, the parodists aggressively refashion its clichés of cultural difference and outsiderdom. Stereotypes are neither pedagogically resisted and nuanced, nor ignored (or dismissed with a gesture), but are over-fulfilled to the point of absurdity. The effect is to construct a collective opposition to German bourgeois society, an artefact of the fictional writing, which threatens to come to real life as an embodiment of German bourgeois nightmares: an uprising of the immigrant underclass, of knife-wielding, drug-dealing, house-breaking, gun-smuggling, people-trafficking public enemies: Kanaken. Zaimoglu is the leading exponent of this approach, which, as I have shown elsewhere, has been highly successful in exciting interest among publishers and readers for the work of young Turkish and other 'other' Germans. It is debatable to what extent he achieved a more than rhetorical distance from axialism, and indeed he has admitted that the 'movement' associated with him - Kanak Attak - was no more than 'the latest multiculturalism'. Focusing on young 'socially excluded' MigrantInnen, his early work of the 1990s starkly problematised the notion of representation by claiming to combine techniques of ethnography and reportage with poetic creativity, but he was inevitably hailed as the main public spokesman of the many young German Turks who resist the pressures to 'integrate' and 'assimilate'. Following many rappers in reclaiming the slur 'Kanak[e]' as a 'badge of identity', Zaimoglu licensed many others to do the same, not least Osman Engin in the novel Kanaken-Gandhi. Engin's novel, based on his satirical columns published since 1989 in Bremer (Bremen's city magazine) and Titanik, offers a similarly discomforting attack on German state and everyday racism-cum-multiculturalism, using some similar parodic techniques. But while Zaimoglu portrays banal everyday life and foregrounds the bitterness and resentment in his young characters, Engin constructs satirically extreme scenarios of degradation in which his protagonist ('Osman Engin', guest-worker and family man) remains stubbornly optimistic. Even when - as at the close of Kanaken-Gandhi - he is being deported from Germany as a supposed Indian illegal immigrant, after forty years of factory work, Engin over-fulfils the stereotype of the submissive Turk. Both writers satirise the discourse of identity by pushing its racist assumptions to the limits, drawing sharp attention to the constructedness of the burdens of representation under which they labour. Their depictions of both Turks and Germans are controversial, among many (German) Turks and many (mono) Germans. They provoke debates which move - at least sometimes - beyond the stock positions of patronising pity and passive self-pity or righteous indignation. At the very least, they have helped to ensure that the problems of essentialism underlying multiculturalism - and axialism - are much more widely understood. If refusal sidesteps the burdens of representation, and parodic ethnicisation thrusts them back at those who impose them, then a third strategy, glocalism, seeks to construct new imaginative contexts in which the burdens take on different significance, receding from the foreground in a wider cultural-historical perspective. This tendency is present in many writers' work, but properly developed in only two novels that I have found so far. One is a well-researched historical detective fiction set in Frankfurt am Main in 1886, in which a young Jewish woman investigates a murder mystery. Hilal Sezgin's Der Tod des Maßschneiders puts into literary practice the identification of Turks and Jews, but only implicitly. It depicts the religious-'racial' social divide, but it focuses far more on tensions between the new rulers in Berlin and Frankfurt's traditional independence, on the social consequences of industrial development, and especially on the rise of the socialist and feminist movements. The global and historical dimensions of such themes are not much developed, as the novel is constrained by its genre. Nevertheless I would argue that it exemplifies a strategy which neither dwells on nor side-steps axialist themes, but instead incorporates them as part of a wider study of society and the individual. But it was for my second example of glocalism that I adopted the term. Ja, sagt Molly, by the late Kemal Kurt, is a seriously playful novel which tackles global issues from a local perspective. Kurt was mainly celebrated for his children's books, but he also published some volumes of poems, one accompanied by his own photographs, and an eminently axialist work of non-fiction which combines travelogue, memoir and astute reflections on the problems of German-Turkish relations. Ja, sagt Molly was his first work of adult fiction. It is a short novel in which three strands are interwoven. Most space is taken up by a story set in an imaginary world city, in which the Library of Babel (as in the famous Borges story) is running out of space. The librarians announce a decision to cut holdings in twentieth-century literature down to just one book. The protagonists of various works now begin to compete for survival: some murder one another, others commit suicide, some seek to organise resistance. In successive sections, Kurt develops a series of skilled and witty parodies of the writing of Albert Camus, Umberto Eco, Agatha Christie, John Dos Passos, Carlos Fuentes, Ivo Andric and many others, in which philosophical dialogue is usually punctuated by sudden assassination. In one section, protagonists from novels by Michael Ondaatje, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Amy Tan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Aras Ören and Tahar Ben Jalloun gather in the house of Mr Biswas (V.S. Naipaul) to draft a manifesto for the 'fifth literature' - the literature of translingualism and transnationalism - only to be killed in a grenade attack led by Ernst Jünger's Oberförster (from Auf den Marmorklippen): 'Ihr Kanaken wollt unsere Literatur beherrschen? Daß ich nicht lache!' (70-76 (75)). Other sections feature musical scores illustrating a disquisition on love in literature (88-98), a monologue by Samuel Beckett's Murphy with marginal annotations à la Arno Schmidt (77-80), and a drama for the voices of Captain Cat, Shen Te, Bérenger, Mr and Mrs Smith, Willy Loman, Balakerim and 'Sechs Personen, die einen Autor suchen' (115-120). The second strand, interwoven with the first, tells the leisurely story of an erotic encounter between Joyce's Molly Bloom and Kafka's Gregor Samsa - in his metamorphosed state - in which they jointly dream the first strand. The two strands eventually fuse in Molly's climactic orgasm, as the Library is attacked by a mob of protagonists and burned to the ground. The third strand consists of brief interruptions on nearly every page of text, in the form of short italicised sentences, each recording a fact of twentieth-century world history, in chronological order from the Boxer Uprising (1900-01) to the resignation of Suharto (1997 - this was presumably when Kurt completed the manuscript). Thus the drama mentioned above is punctuated by 'news' of the election of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the fall and killing of Ceausescu, the election of Vaclav Havel, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the military coup in Sudan, the fall of Alfred Stroessner, the US invasion of Panama, and the Baltic states' declaration of independence. Among other things, this unique millennial metanovel is a compendium of historical and literary information about the last century, completed by an appendix listing the sources - mostly novels, a few dramas - from which all the protagonists are taken. There are about 165 of them. The most frequently represented original languages are as follows: English 67; German 32; French 16; Spanish 12; Turkish 10; Italian 8; Russian 8. Kurt has given us a snapshot of his reading in 'world literature' over a lifetime spent successively in Turkey (childhood), Switzerland (adolescence), the USA (college) and Germany (adulthood). His selection of twentieth-century classics is global in range, stretching as far as the western publishing industry does. But it also clearly reflects the trilingual Kurt's local - or rather, translocal - perspective. A very high proportion of the North American authors are black, and not only are there many more Turkish authors than any non-Turk would include (Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu and Halide Edib Adivar as well as Yasar Kemal and Orhan Pamuk), but far more German names than anyone not well versed in German literature would include (Ulrich Plenzdorf and Carl Zuckmayer as well as Günter Grass and Thomas Mann). In a curious way both unassuming and megalomaniac, Kurt quietly inscribes himself into the world-wide modernist and postmodernist pantheon of Nobel Prize winners and candidates - and also the smaller pantheon of the most frequently translated popular authors - without forgetting to pay homage to his local peers. His text is madly pretentious in concept, but beguilingly modest in the execution: homage is the key mode, as remembrance and love are the key themes. Literary glocalism, as embodied in this work, means cosmopolitanism rooted in a particular, locally (or personally) significant set of national and transnational literatures, which includes the global dominant - Anglophonia - and its concept of 'world literature', but other literatures as well. If, as Fredric Jameson argued, 'Third-World' literature aspires to the status of 'national allegory', Kurt's text creates a global-local allegory. This glocalism engages with the thematics of axialism, but only as one facet of a work concerned more fundamentally with questions of memory and forgetting, violence and ethics, in the setting of the global metropolis which is everywhere and nowhere in particular. Glocalism means refusing to write as an 'ethnic' writer, instead writing as a representative of a 'fifth literature' - which is represented by many more writers in Kurt's pantheon than those who gather in the house of Mr Biswas. In short, it means transcending - in the domain of the fiction - ascribed identities, and positioning oneself not in social terms, but in imaginative literary terms. Systematically generous intertextuality renders identity-talk obsolete. In some other German-Turkish writers, notably Dal and Senocak, one sees this tendency at work. Dal's Der enthaarte Affe (1988; revised as Janitscharenmusik (1999)), for example, is a self-reflexive 'novelist's novel' which both explicitly and implicitly refers to and builds upon dozens of Turkish, German, Latin American, British, French, Italian and North American novels. Senocak's eminently writerly texts refer, more often between the lines, to an equally wide range of reading. Both authors mine axial thematics for more general insights. Yet in both, as in other axialist writing, relatively particular questions of identity and stereotype in specific transnational contexts of migration and minority culture finally seem to dominate the imaginative work. Or at least, the work puts up relatively little resistance to such readings. In Kurt's case, the whole of Ja, sagt Molly constitutes a rebuke to anyone who would ask such an author to 'represent' his ethnic group, but does so with no signs of 'Kanak'-style resentment at such an expectation. Instead, his text powerfully undermines the notion that literature can or should 'represent' in the sense of speaking for some particular social group, by exemplifying the idea that literature represents only itself, and problems common to the human species. This summary account of some German-Turkish novelists' diverse ways of juggling the burdens of representation begs many questions which need further analysis. Does my suggested quartet of strategies hold analytical water? Can it be refined, or must it be jettisoned? If not, then to what extent is it specific to writers in Germany or in German, to writers of Turkish background, to the novel genre, or to the past 25 years or so? Would it be (more) productive to pitch the analysis of 'strategies' at the level of the individual text, and to investigate how writing styles, narrators, or (other) characters negotiate multiple expectations on the part of anticipated readers (which is another way of speaking of the 'burdens')? Is it real experiences of reception which lead writers to adopt - or alter - strategies, or do these choices spring from other sources? And to return after all (perhaps inevitably, in search of a final thought) to a teleological perspective: is there any sign that the uncomfortable self-consciousness of 'ethnic' and 'hybrid' writers, as more or less forcibly recruited representatives of supposedly bounded socio-cultural collectives, is diminishing, now that a growing segment of German society no longer associates (for example) Turkish names with disturbing difference, so that their work can be read more as literature than as 'social evidence'? In Kemal Kurt's words, in the mouth of Gregor: 'Nun hat das neue Jahrhundert begonnen. Hoffentlich wird es ein gutes - was man von dem alten Jahrhundert beim besten Willen nicht behaupten kann. Zwar sprechen alle Anzeichen dagegen, doch hoffen müssen wir trotzdem.' (150)

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