THE PRECEDING TRANSCRIPT MERELY DOCUMENTS the unprepared responses of a few politicians and select artists to a particularly provocative example of Feridun Zaimoglu's early, quasi-documentary monologues. This dialogue, however, very strikingly demonstrates life exactly imitating art. Heide Simonis gives a splendid performance as a patronizing, would-be do-gooder, who seems complacent in the certainty of her own culture's superiority, yet is also threatened by cultural difference. Zaimoglu's characters use the terminology of militant leftist, antifascist, antiracist polemic to identify figures like her as “liberals.” She can only accept “others” in subordinate positions and condemns verbal and symbolic violence even as she metes it out. She comes extremely close to denying Zaimoglu his right to speak as a German artist. Thus she “outs” herself as a “Kanak-eater,” exactly as is predicted in the very first quotation from Zaimoglu's work. The studio dialogue reveals little about Turkish German literature beyond the unsurprising fact that it often features the controversial themes of migration and settlement. It does, however, reveal quite a lot about the cultural-political context in which such literature is received.

This book pursues three main ideas. The first is that Turkish German literature both issues from and accelerates what Ulrich Beck terms the “cosmopolitanization” of German society and culture, or its “globalization from within” (Beck 2002), which involves what Zafer Şenocak calls the “extension of the concept of Germanness” (1993, 11). The title's reference to a “literature of settlement” corresponds to this idea.