The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Luz Angélica Kirschner

This chapter explores the human rights issues connected to minority literatures by examining two cases. By studying Jewish-Argentine and Turkish-German literatures, we can appreciate the ways that writers use literary forms to explore the possibilities and constraints of minority agency as they work to promote human rights and become a catalyst for cultural transformation and political change. Entrenched as these literatures are in specific national-sociopolitical conflicts and ideological undercurrents, they are also embedded in international and transnational entanglements in the context of neoliberal globalization. In what follows, I first illustrate the sociohistorical circumstances that inform the experiences of these two minorities and subsequently locate their literary productions within the respective national literary canons to illustrate my argument.

The Jewish-Argentine and Turkish-German minorities

Jewish Argentines and Turkish Germans are minority communities, to different degrees, marked by religion in countries that are primarily Catholic/Christian. With an estimate of 250,000 Jewish Argentines, the group constitutes the largest Jewish population in Latin America. This eclectic community includes linguistically and culturally dissimilar Arab Jews, Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, and Sephardim and is mainly the result of mass migration from Eastern Europe and, to a lesser degree, Balkan, Middle Eastern, and North African countries during the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries (Bejarano 2012; Rein 2010: 26). The arrival of Turkish Germans, to a significant extent, has to be understood in the context of the German postwar economy and the intergovernmental contracts that Germany forged, between 1955 and 1968, with eight Mediterranean countries – Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia – to recruit Gastarbeiter (guest workers), who were needed to compensate for the scarcity of labor in specific areas in the booming economy. With roughly 3 million Turkish Germans, this group is now the largest ethnic minority in Germany and encompasses, for instance, “rural, urban; elites, working class; Sunnis, Alevis; Turks, Kurds; Islamic, secular; or naturalized Germans, [and] Turkish nationals” (Mandel 2008: 2).

Both nations have had complex ideas about the role of immigrants in forging their national identities. Argentine identity has been based on a myth of western European origins and racial “whiteness” and since the 1920s has acknowledged – very much to the detriment of its African and indigenous populations and less privileged sectors – “We are a country of immigrants” (Garguin 2007: 168). In contrast, only recently has Germany reluctantly admitted to also being a country of immigrants (Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes 2007: 4). Further, although gender bias excluded women from citizenship until 1947 in Argentina, the governing elite strove “to transform immigrants into citizens” (Rodriguez 2006: 201). In the German context, however, assimilation and inclusion were not options for the guest workers. This workforce was expected to function in the culture of the receiving nation but was not supposed to become part of it or attain permanent residency. Unlike Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century, restrictive citizenship regulations that have been largely based on jus sanguinis (law of the blood) have meant that about a third of Turkish Germans still remain noncitizens with limited political rights.

Unfortunately, the new German citizenship law that went into effect January 1, 2000, which suspends ancestry as a prerequisite for citizenship, has not produced the anticipated positive effects but rather generated legal oddities since 2013. The groundbreaking act – also known as the “option model” – conferred temporal dual citizenship to children born in Germany of foreign parents since 1990 until the age of 23, at which point the young adults had to decide in favor of either German citizenship or the citizenship of their parents. With those born in 1990 turning 23 in 2013, however, a growing number of Germans who declined or forgot to renounce their Turkish citizenship have lost their German nationality (Naumann 2013; Bader 2013; Dick 2013). Since Turkey is not part of the EU and Germans of Turkish descent are the largest immigrant group, they have been most severely affected by the law. As such, the German government’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Markus Löning, saw Germany’s “credibility” (Brössler 2013) as worldwide human rights advocate compromised. On July 3, 2014, the grand coalition between the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democrats (SPD) revoked the “option model” and implemented dual citizenship at an individual level for children born in Germany to foreign parents (Meiritz 2014; Brauneis 2014; Käfer 2014; Reuters 2014).

German coordinates

To make sense of the position of Turkish Germans and their literary production within German society and culture, it is necessary to engage not only the thorny collusion between Germany’s and Turkey’s secularist and nationalist discursive regimes (Weber 2013: 1–38; Yükleyen 2012; Ewing 2003) but also the central role of Orientalism in Germany and Europe in general. Long before the emergence of the Turkish or the German nations, this antagonistic discourse has constructed “the Turk” (Cheesman 2001: 137) as the threat to Christian Europe and German culture par excellence and continues to prevent the German state from recognizing the rights of its Turkish-German constituency to (dual) citizenship and, despite freedom of religion guaranteed by the law, to different religious rites, attire, customs, behavior, values, and beliefs. Of all immigrants living in the Federal Republic, in the popular imagination of the nation “Turks” (read: Muslims) seem to appear uniquely Other (Kolinsky 2002: 205). From this perspective, undemocratic and unchangeable Turkish-German culture violates human rights through the (unmodern) body of the perpetually victimized Muslim (read: Turkish) woman at the hands of a necessarily fundamentalist and violent Muslim subject. Muslim women, however, can also be “aggressors” (Edmunds 2011: 1192). Visibly observant Muslimas and Muslims are a threat to the public order; they disrespect democratic values and disregard religious freedom.

Turkish-German literature and the German literary landscape

Since their arrival in Germany in the 1960s, guest workers have produced a heterogeneous and multilingual body of literature. From the late 1970s and early 1980s on, German institutional sponsorship and major publishing houses have promoted the publication of this work, primarily by Turkish Germans. Despite official support, however, the legality of Turkish-German writing within the nation’s literary landscape remains unresolved, although its major authors are “German citizens” (Adelson 2005: 23). Akif Pirinçci, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoğlu, Renan Demirkan, or Zafer Şenocak are a few of the numerous Turkish-German authors who approach issues of identity, German history, racism, sexism, difference, memory, and language, among other subject matters, sometimes in controversial ways, and enjoy different degrees of recognition nationally and internationally. By 2014, the polyglot Turkish-German literary production has come to constitute an eclectic body of work that includes experimental and nonexperimental novels, drama, poetry, novellas, diaries, letters, short stories, pamphlets, essays, and memoirs. And yet, no genre has so persistently captivated the imagination of the German public like the so-called victim testimonial of Oriental cultural inhumanity with the “maltreated Suleika” at its center (Cheesman 2007: 113). A subgenre of testimonial literature, these individual life narratives aim to raise awareness of forced arranged marriages, honor killings, and misogynist violence in Turkish-German and Islamic-German society. Their writers count the celebrated Sahila Scheinhardt and Alev Tekinay in the 1980s and 1990s; more recently, Seyran Ateş and Necla Kelek are bestseller personalities who have been advanced as “experts” on the violent gender relations among Muslims in general based on their personal narratives and subjective perceptions.

The emergence of the Orientalizing stereotype of Turkish women’s uniform victimhood as a literary theme goes back to “the mid-1970s” (Fischer and McGowan 1996: 12) when in scenarios plagued by binary oppositions, female guest workers with little education recorded their painful experiences with the paternalistic assistance of educated German women, who in turn, with the intention to induce empathy, converted the accounts into well-structured narratives for a German audience (Suhr 1989: 92–93). Simultaneously, although some immigrant writers were becoming politicized or explored aesthetic matters, the institutional sponsorship contributed to the stereotyping of the literature as “foreign” (because written by non-Germans) and framed the choice of subject matters, thereby equally promoting the emergence of the depoliticized trope of the immigrant “caught between native and German cultures” (Chin 2003: 73), a too-familiar figure in immigrant German literatures. Undemocratic gender relations among Muslims (read: Turks) have become an obsession for some non-Muslim and Muslim – German feminists, experts, writers, and politicians (Schneiders 2010) – who feel compelled to mobilize sympathizers to protect these women. By failing to theorize the impact of the intersection of (the violence of) structural racism, sexism, Islamophobia, nationalism, and ethnicity in the German setting, however, their promotion of women’s rights systematically delivers decontextualized and ahistorical representations of Muslim identities and Islam that ethnicize sexism (Weber 2013:12) and instead conjure deep-rooted fears of Islam to the detriment of the community. Incidentally, their thoughtless appropriation of human rights disavows the existing gender inequity and the recurrence of violence in relationships and families in other sectors of German and western societies, while sophisticated interventions of Turkish and non–Turkish German antiracist intellectuals, such as (to mention only a few) Mely Kiyak (2008, 2012), Helma Lutz (2011), or Hilal Sezgin (2008, 2009), have limited public resonance, undoubtedly because their work reveals the double standard that unquestionably links democratic Western Europe as the unique defender of women’s rights and universal human rights. Exclusively authors whose writing supports the widespread ideas of Muslim violence and illiberal gender relations become visible spokespersons of the heterogeneous peoples of Turkish background in Germany while Turkish-German literature is not recognized as integral to the German literary tradition and remains largely ignored (Konzett 2003: 46–50). And yet, it is worth noting that despite shifting demographics and a growing Turkish-German middle class of native German speakers who have German citizenship, there is virtually no recognition and literary depiction of this population as part of the German nation and full recipients of state rights.

The relentless linguistic construction of Turkish Germans as eternal “migrants” (El-Tayeb 2011: xiv), i.e., nomads with partial rights – even in the possession of legal citizenship – can partly help us understand the discursive cultural but also administrative construction of Turkish Germans as incompatible with “Germanness” and ultimately “Europeanness.” Despite the fact that the German language has “[t]he terms Einwanderer (immigrant) and ethnische Minderheit (ethnic minority)” (Mandel 2008: 335), these words are usually not used “within the migration discourse” (Mandel 2008: 335) of the nation; it is as if “there are no such concepts” (Mandel 2008: 81) to lead debates. The common expressions to refer to native and non-native Turkish Germans and others are ausländische Mitbürger (foreign fellow citizens) or Mitbürger mit Migrationshintergrund (fellow citizens of migrant background). To some degree, these linguistic oddities result from the misappropriation of the categories by the Nazi ideology of ethnicization that continues to hinder the German government from officially recognizing its ethnic and racial groups (Joppke 2003: 361). There are no categories to name experiences resulting from structural racism in Germany although das Allgemeine Gleichbehandlungsgesetz-AGG (the law of general equality of treatment) has been in effect since August 18, 2006 (Cáceres 2014; Mattheis 2006). And yet, the process of ethnicization and racialization takes place while the nation’s unwillingness to acknowledge its ethnic and racial constituencies is inconsistent as the recognition of “ethnic Germans” and “Russian Jews” display (Joppke 2003: 362). Race and racism are unspeakable in neoliberal Germany, where World War II is also deployed to proclaim German and European unmistakable moral preeminence and political acumen: Germany and Europe have learned from the past and are now beyond (the troubles of) racism and gender while signifying the inexorable incompatibility of Islam with secular Germany and the Judeo-Christian values of the European Union.

In 2013, Semiya Şimşek published the testimonial Schmerzliche Heimat: Deutschland und der Mord an meinem Vater (Painful Homeland: Germany and the Murder of My Father) in the context of the discovery of the second sizeable racist attack on the Turkish-German community at the hands of the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund or NSU (National-Socialist Underground Faction) – called by the media the right-wing Zwickauer Terrorzelle (Zwickauer Terror Faction). Şimşek is the daughter of Enver Şimşek, the first victim of a killing spree that took place between September 9, 2000 and April 6, 2006 throughout Germany and that became public in September 2011 (Deiß 2013). Not only the immediacy but also the uncompromising and bold confrontation of the nation and the German government with its own racism and disregard of basic human rights make Şimşek’s narrative unique, remarkable, and important. The account documents the 11-year-long family ordeal – as suspects of the homicide – at the hands of the prejudiced police officers whom the family trusted. The killer faction managed to remain undetected for over 13 years because the police and the Internal Intelligence Service discarded racist motives and viewed the murders as unrelated and isolated crimes (Stern 2011). Relying on all prevalent truisms of Muslim/Turkish violence and criminality (as well as German liberalism), officers and politicians viewed the killings as part of Turkish mafia-like criminal structures, and refused to recognize them as terror attacks with political or racist motivations perpetrated by Germans against Turkish Germans. The reception of Şimşek’s work has been positive. But it remains to be seen how far Şimşek’s account and the horrendous crimes, that bring to mind the hate crimes against women and children in Mölln 1992, and Solingen 1993, will impact the collective German imagination concerning the way Turkish Germans are perceived. Will these stories help build a sense of the dignity and rights of Turkish Germans, or will they remain “Turks” (read: Muslims)? Most importantly, will these citizens affect the way that the German nation perceives itself? Given the way that Europe and Germany have responded to the current economic crisis and social tensions by consistently demoting Muslims and Islam in the hopes of generating European ideological unity, this is a daunting task.

An Argentine state of mind

Argentina was not necessarily a paradise for immigrants, even if many of them successfully integrated into the middle class. The liberal oligarchs were not interested in changing the colonial status quo, advancing the position of the newcomers, or addressing social inequity (Rock 1975: 1–24). Instead, they targeted political activism, which was considered to be the activity of the immigrants since, it was believed, “Italians or Russians” (read: Jews) were dangerous elements responsible for introducing degenerate revolutionary doctrines from the Old World to the New. Concurrently, Argentina is a Catholic nation of immigrants that was strongly shaped by the ideology of the crisol de razas (crucible of races) – the Argentine version of the Latin American ideology of mestizaje – which, though seemingly celebrating cultural fusion, was not interested in forging a culturally and religiously diverse nation (Kirschner 2012: 9). The ideology sought to construct a country of loyal Argentines that, unlike other inferior Latin American mestizo lands, was homogenously white, Christian, and western European. Argentina has experienced several waves of anti-Semitism, and popular expressions of it have been common. For instance, the first organized attack against Jewish neighborhoods took place in 1919 during the Semana Trágica (The Tragic Week, January 7 to January 13). The occurrence began as a labor conflict that grew into a general strike that the elites and middle-class Radical leaders wrongly imagined to be “Jewish bolshevism” (McGee Deutsch 1986: 118) based on the stereotype of Russian Jews as anarchists. The nationalist attacks from right-wing groups as a result of Adolf Eichmann’s kidnapping in Buenos Aires are also illustrative. While after the Eichmann affair relations between Israel and Argentina quickly improved, Jewish Argentines, whose loyalty was questioned, had to endure years of “anti-Semitism” (Rein 2003: 173).

Jewish-Argentine literature and the Argentine literary landscape

Jewish authors often write for a small community; their productions are sometimes published and promoted by small Jewish or independent publishing houses. On occasion writers have opted to avoid Jewish themes altogether to reach a wider audience. In Latin America, sales mostly “come from within the Jewish community” (Sadow 1999: xxvi), while these writers’ works might “be more read by people living in the United States” than in the region (Stavans 2004: 182). Their literature engages the difficulties of being Jewish and Argentine, immigration, anti-Semitism, assimilation, sexism, racism, religious identity, Zionism, Argentine history, and has often been an important “countervoice to official discourse” (Lockhart 1997: xvi). Indeed, the nation’s overwhelming sociopolitical realities have opened spaces that have enabled the emergence of Jewish Argentines as prominent public intellectuals and community leaders, and, like other non-Jewish public figures, made them sometimes vulnerable to repression. Though largely marginal to the national canon, the few (of the about 350 current writers) who have achieved recognition have made powerful contributions to the nation and have been vindicated by change.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Latin America was characterized by an unprecedented wave of political authoritarianism and a severe crisis of human rights. Initially with support of the population, Argentina was a dictatorial regime from 1976 to 1983. It is true that during this period of Argentine history, referred to as the Guerra Sucia (Dirty War), some Jewish Argentines joined bourgeois Argentines in disconnecting themselves from their horrid historical context (Feitlowitz 2011). But it is also true that the Jewish community was excessively affected by the terror: “Jews amounted to 1 percent of the population and about 10 percent of the disappeared” (McGee Deutsch 2005: 65), as the nation sustained “excellent relations” with the State of Israel (Rein 2010: 236). While the military regime, Proceso de Reconstrucción Nacional (Process of National Reorganization), built a sophisticated apparatus of repression that sought to eradicate Marxism and leftist subversion in the name of western Christian civilization, Argentines of all denominations and classes managed to develop the most powerful human rights movement in Latin America (Wright 2007: xiii) and helped to shape contemporary international human rights. Under the shadow of terror, Argentine cultural production was persistently continued by both Jewish and non-Jewish exiled literati and intellectuals who stayed in the country (Foster 1995: 1–11). For example, the journalist Jacobo Timerman (1923–99), founder of the newspaper La Opinión, called “the Le Monde of Latin America” (Rein and Davidi 2010: 1), was kidnapped by the military junta in April 1977 and deported to Israel in 1979. During his exile, the human-rights activist wrote the testimonial Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (1981), an international bestseller that greatly helped expose the brutality and anti-Semitism integral to the terror regime. Another example is the work of the abducted activist and poet Alicia Partnoy, whose memoir La escuelita (1986, The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival), written in US exile, revealed to the world the treatment of women in the torture chambers. During the Proceso and after it, high-profile intellectuals such as the writer Marcos Aguinis, intellectual leader in both the Jewish community and in Argentina, have analyzed and dissected the traditional military mentality of the nation.

Joining their compatriots, Jewish Argentines contributed to the emergence and consolidation of domestic human rights organizations such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) and the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), not to mention the late Renée Epelbaum (1920–98) or Matilda Mellibowsky. Jewish Argentines also have promoted the organization Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia y contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS, or Children for Identity and Justice and against Forgetting and Silence). By exposing “disappearances” as human rights violations, Argentine women’s struggles have complicated the understanding of accountability for deaths at the hands of armed groups or extremist death squads that “even if not committed by the state, were allowed by it to happen” (Bunch 1990: 497). The democratization process also facilitated the official recognition of ethnic minorities and advanced the analysis of race and institutionalized racism, which continue to be essential, though until recently unspeakable, mechanisms of exclusion in Argentina (Sutton 2010: 80–95). Further, the “disappearance” of indigenous (Foster, Fitch Lockhart, and Lockhart 1998: 8) and Afro-Argentine populations and the discrimination against “Jewish, Roma, Armenian, and Arab peoples” (Sutton 2008: 107, 114) in the construction of the white Western European identity myth of the nation are now more openly discussed.

On July 18, 1994, a bomb destroyed the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA, or Jewish Mutual Aid Society) in downtown Buenos Aires. Two years before, on March 17, 1992, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed. These violent incidents remain unresolved. In particular, the AMIA attack that directly targeted Argentine citizens revived histories of anti-Semitism and memories of impunity that impelled a crisis of belonging among many Jewish Argentines. Social movements such as Memoria Activa (Active Memory) were formed to struggle for accountability, and these joined existing human rights groups to condemn judicial inefficiency. “Writing from grief, anger, and outrage” (Sadow 2005: 161), others recorded their fears and hopes as Jewish Argentines. In Hija del silencio (1999; Daughter of Silence 2012), for instance, the late Manuela Fingueret (1945–2013) reconnects with her familial history of the Holocaust, thereby incorporating European history into contemporary Argentine consciousness. But the economic crisis of 2001 has also left an impoverished middle class, to which many Jewish Argentines belonged, to the extent that the magnitude of pauperization, scholars suggest, has affected the social structure of the country and produced “new xenophobias” and “new ethnic politics” (Grimson and Kessler 2005: 117) that affect border immigrants – most significantly, Bolivians.

Anti-Semitism remains relevant in the constitution of Argentine identity, the institutional power of the Catholic Church persists, and the popularity of the myth of western European “whiteness” is high. The struggle for human rights is endless and urgent. But the Argentine case displays the metamorphosis that a country can undergo and the significant improvements in the field of human rights that literature and social movements can accomplish. Argentina shows that innovation does not necessarily have to come from seemingly democratic European countries, though their minorities suffer serious human rights abuses, “but can also be initiated by innovative countries in the global South” (Sikkink 2011: 90). Germany’s reluctance to embrace its status as a country of immigrants continues to hinder the implementation of realistic immigration and settlement policies that are demographically and economically unavoidable. The marginal position (despite legal citizenship) of Jewish-Argentine and Turkish-German literatures within the national literary canons not only exhibits the risks, limits, and possibilities of literature on solving problems of Otherness, exclusion, and human rights’ violations; it equally bespeaks the restricted integrating force of citizenship in our globalized world. And, yet, the Argentine case also suggests that only the meaningful intersection of literature and collective grassroots action can make possible the indispensable move, borrowing Elaine Scarry’s terms, “from the literary to the legal” (1998: 50) in the continuous political struggle of minorities for citizenship, equal chances to full economic inclusion, genuine social participation, and human rights.