From “Kanak” Culture to Religious Cosmopolitanism

FERIDUN ZAIMOGLU (b. 1964 in Bolu, Turkey) came to Germany from Turkey in 1965, where he remains best known for his polemical debut Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Kanak Speak: 24 Discordant Notes from the Edge of Society, 1995), which spawned the “Kanak Attak” subculture movement. Yet despite the domination of his earlier interview-based work—still often viewed as ethnographic fieldwork rather than literature in our overall understanding of his oeuvre— Zaimoglu's profile as a writer of fiction and as a dramatist has grown. His work has received increasing scholarly and media attention, and he has won prestigious awards: the Chamisso Prize (2005), the Carl Améry Prize for Literature (2007), the Berlin Literature Prize (2016), and, with Ilija Trojanow, the Tübingen Poetry Lectureship, published as Ferne Nähe (Distant Proximity, 2008).

Zaimoglu's work is exceptionally varied, in both its form and content— he has written collections of monologues, plays and chamber operas (all in collaboration with Günter Senkel), short stories, novels, and a diary, all dealing with a range of themes such as folklore, the gentrification of German cities, and the Berlin art world, in addition to disenfranchised Turkish German youths. He has also exhibited paintings, and his novel Der Mietmaler (The Painter for Rent, 2013) contains images of some of his portraits of women.

Most important for this study, however, are the multiple concepts of religion and spirituality that figure in Zaimoglu's writing. Cheesman notices a religious cosmopolitanism emerging in the 2004 short story collection Zwölf Gramm Glück (Twelve Grams of Happiness) that counteracts the prevailing secularizing Enlightenment understanding of the cosmopolitan. This critique of atheism's totalizing claims can also be found in the folk belief and superstition that feature in the trans- European novel Hinterland (2009), the Ruhr revenge story Ruß (Soot, 2011), and the play Alpsegen (Alpine Blessing, 2011), among other works. Yet a multifaceted understanding of Islam emerges as the most prominent aspect of Zaimoglu's interest in religion and spirituality. While post-9/11 texts such as the novel Leyla (2006)—a fictionalized biography of the author's Turkish mother—engages with Islam in the form of culturally Islamic patriarchal traditions, others explore Islam in terms of religiosity and faith.