Die Ichsetzung als Effekt des Dritten. Feridun Zaimoglus Plädoyer für kulturelle Differenz.

In a German society characterized by immigration, ethnic diversity and cultural heterogeneity, the question of national identity and that of individual groups has become particularly important in the course of globalization. Since the waves of immigration from southern Europe in the mid-1950s and later from southeastern and eastern Europe, this question has also become politically virulent in the wake of right-wing extremist attacks in the early 1990s at the latest. It gains additional explosiveness in the 21st century, because the since then recognizable tendencies of pluralization of lifestyles and the renaissance of ethnic consciousness will coincide with a demo- graphic change of the ethnic composition within German society. According to the latest figures from the Federal Statistical Office, 10.6 million foreigners currently live in Germany (as of 2018 for the year 2017). With a population of around 82.5 million, this corresponds to a proportion of foreigners of around 12.5 percent. Of these, 19.3 million people have a migration background. The writer Feridun Zaimoeglu, born in Bolu (Turkey) in 1964 and living in Germany for over 40 years with short interruptions, is one of them. His advocacy for marginalized Turks, to whom he lends his literary voice, has earned him attributions such as "Malcolm X of the Turks" or "writing arm of Turkish power." With his first book Kanak Sprak, he presented authentic confessions by young men of Turkish descent that caused a sensation within a very short time. For years, he researched the fringes of German society in the milieu of multi-ethnic migrants who call themselves Kanaks. How does a Kanak live in Germany? was his provocative question. The result is 24 misnomers on the fringes of society, as the book Kanak Sprak is subtitled. Zaimoglu, who enjoys the status of a cult author in the scene, is not only the (co)founder of the German-Turkish mixed language that goes by the label Kanak sprak, but also the literary spokesman of the third generation of migrants. With his first book Kanak Sprak, he presented authentic confessions by young men of Turkish descent that caused a sensation within a very short time. For years, he researched on the fringes of German society in the milieu of multi-ethnic migrants who call themselves Kanaks. How does a Kanak live in Germany? was his provocative question. The result is 24 misnomers on the fringes of society, as the book Kanak Sprak is subtitled. In addition to Kanak Sprak, the Turkish-born author has drawn attention to the social type and ethnic niche of the Kanak in other works. The novel Abschaum (1997) chronicles in 13 episodes the true story of Ertan Ongun (the subtitle). This was followed in 1998 by Koppstoff. Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Kanaka Sprak from the Fringes of Society), the female counterpart to Kanak Sprak, that is, 26 protocols by Turkish migrant women. Here, as there, those representatives from "the league of the damned" have their say who, unlike their fathers' generation who came to Germany as guest workers, perceive discrimination from a completely different perspective. With their generation, the discussion about the integration of citizens of a different origin, different religious orientation and with certain ethnic and cultural ideas of life has reached a first decisive climax. They strictly reject acculturation in the sense of adaptation, which is understood as a reaction to a long-term contact situation with the German majority culture, usually existing since childhood. This conscious positioning in the field of tension between foreign and their own culture is ultimately not only an attempt to preserve their own cultural values, but also and especially to critically question these values themselves in order to create a new basis for their identity. This attempt can be subsumed under the dynamic of the effects of the third, which always arise when intellectual operations no longer merely oscillate between the two sides of a distinction, but the distinction as such becomes the object and problem. In the negotiation of a new identity between foreign and one's own culture, the fact of the distinction is added like a third. The distance to possible cultural reference systems becomes politically virulent at the latest when the socio-political attempt to create a unity threatens to fail because of the "difference between one's own and foreign cultures". This article deals with the distinction that the cultural scientist Homi Bhabha has terminologically occupied with the concepts of cultural diversity and cultural difference, in order to derive his theory of the 'third space' and to apply it to Feridun Zaimoglu's poetics.