German Minority Literature: Tongues Set Free & Pointed Tongues

When Elias Canetti--polyglot, author, Spanish-speaking, Bulgarian-born Jew, and 1981 Nobel laureate--wrote his 1977 autobiographical novel The Tongue Set Free, from which the title of this article is taken, he could have had no inkling that he would be recruited two decades later for the purpose of examining whether another German-speaking author (from halfway across the world) belonged to a genre that was not even known in 1977: German minority literature. Indeed, as non-ethnic Germans were being presented by such publishing houses as Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (four anthologies appeared between 1978 and 1980), no one thought to connect Cannetti with what has come to be variously known as guest-worker literature (Gastarbeiterliteratur) and foreigner literature (Auslanderliteratur), or minority literature. Bringing Canetti and minority literature together is primarily a useful Goethe-esque conceit, for it allows one to take a broader view of the genre, one that spans both East and West. However, for the purpose of this article, Canetti largely serves as a foil for the author on whom I wish to focus--the Indian-born poet Anant Kumar, a graduate and one-time employee of the New Delhi Goethe Institute, who now lives and writes in Kassel, Germany. Kumar and Canetti form the bookends of the genre not only in terms of their age (Canetti was born in 1905, Kumar in 1969), but also in terms of their positions relative to the maturation of the genre. Canetti exhibits some qualities similar to those seen in minority literature before its arrival on the literary scene in the late seventies and early eighties.(1) Kumar represents the most recent developments in the genre. Some of the characteristics of Kumar's writings are so different from those we see before him in this genre that it may actually be an indication that the genre, as it is named, may be obsolete. Canetti is a favorite author of another minority German poet, Zehra Cirak, the Istanbul-born daughter of a Gastarbeiter family. Chronologically, she is closest to Canetti--her first volume of poetry appeared barely ten years after The Tongue Set Free--but thematically Cirak is situated approximately two-thirds of the way between the two Canetti-Kumar bookends in Kumar's direction. Cirak was the recipient of the Holderlin Advancement Award (which promotes a younger, less established author) in 1993, the same year that Hilde Domin was awarded the main Holderlin Award. Cirak has long praised Canetti for his wit, his way with words, and his insights into multilingualism and multiculturalism back when the word "multiculturalism" was still a compliment and before it became jargon bandied about by politicians.(2) Cirak is known for her facility with German, for her limberness in walking the tightrope that biculturalism entails. This was what appealed to her in Canetti's autobiography. However, her aversion to her work being reduced to the label Gastarbeiterliteratur or, even worse, to victim literature (Betroffenheitsliteratur) places her closer to Kumar. Kumar was a nominee, and Cirak the recipient, of the 2001 Adelbert von Chamisso Prize awarded non-German authors. Other relatively young minority writers on the German literary scene include several from what is known as the second generation of minority writers. Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, Zafer Senocak, Renan Demirkan, and even Akif Pirincci can be viewed as precursors to Anant Kumar in that all of them boldly and unapologetically claimed their right to German as a literary language before Kumar's arrival in Germany, but in different ways and with various success: Senocak focused on the sociopolitical and founded a publishing house; Demirkan moved from an acting career to writing semi-autobiographical prose and on to dealing with nonminority themes; and Pirincci moved to screenwriting when Ufa turned his 1989 best-seller Felidae into an animated film.(3) Of all the minority writers, Pirincci is the most unabashedly commercial and the one who distanced himself the farthest from the genre of minority literature when he stated that the problems of Turks meant nothing to him. …