FOR THE SAKE OF SIMPLICITY, I would like to state that the accident of my birth was the catalyst for a life of travels and traffic in different linguistic and cultural spaces. I was born in Istanbul to two scientist parents, whose careers were shaped by their German education, and I followed suit. I spent my early childhood in Basel, Switzerland, where my father was studying for his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Basel and where the juxtaposition of two radically different languages as Turkish and Schwitzerdütsch provided me with an unexpected facility to reconcile divergent linguistic and academic interests.

A childhood marked by translation and transport between locales, languages, and cultural habits translated many years later to an enduring fascination with the work of the early German Romantics. As I saw the nuclei of future critical paradigms in their modernity, I allowed my own work to branch out into seemingly divergent but conceptually parallel paths, becoming somewhat accidentally one of the early pioneers of German studies in a cross- and intercultural context—inflected by the Mischgedicht of my competing languages.

By the time I entered the American College in Istanbul, known as Robert College at the time, Schwitzerdütsch remained only a trace of an accent in the Hochdeutsch that I had in the meantime learned in the German Gymnasium (Die deutsche Schule) of Istanbul, a city full of schools, both non-denominational like the German one or the British High School or Catholic convent schools like the French Notre Dame de Sion. Since most parents rightfully felt that their children were born into a language most people in the world knew nothing about and, therefore, had to learn a Western language or two to survive even in their own country, these schools were very much in demand and very difficult to get into. I passed the entrance examinations of all these schools but wanted desperately to go to the American school. However, my mother pointed out that someone had to read all the German books in our house, so I enrolled in the German School and the Schwitzerdütsch was repressed and replaced in the preparatory class, the Vorbereitungsklasse, by High German.