THIS CHAPTER CONSIDERS COSMOPOLITAN IDEALS and ideas in the context of the intertwined significance of genre and gender in Turkish German subgenres of testimonial fiction. It opens with a discussion of the role of female “victim testimonial” in current debates over domestic violence in Turkish families in Germany. Selma Ceylan's Irrsinn der Ehre (Madness of Honor, 1998), an example of “victim testimonial,” is discussed in tandem with Kemal Kurt's novel Ja, sagt Molly, a “virtual literary testimonial” that implicitly reflects the author's experiences as a reader of both literature and newspapers. These two novels, which were published by the same Turkish German publisher in the same year, vary a testimonial formula that reflects on lives lived across international and cultural borders, in order to call for a cosmopolitan resolution of conflicts. The chapter goes on to consider testimonial works by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Renan Demirkan, Alev Tekinay, and Selim Özdogan, which alter the same formula in radically different ways. Finally, texts are discussed that parody the testimonial genre and negate its cosmopolitan consolations. The authors considered here are all men: Osman Engin, Zafer Şenocak, and Feridun Zaimoglu, whose testimonial-based texts include both male and female voices.

Several texts discussed in the next chapter on iconic “Ali” figures have testimonial qualities, such as much of the work of Aras Ören, as well as novels by Saliha Scheinhardt and Dilek Zaptçioglu.