Turkish German Studies is a new field in the humanities and social sciences that researches and documents issues related to Turkish German relations in both their historic and present forms. The field is interested in the impact of Turkish migrants on the German cultural landscape, a phenomenon that is increasingly the focus of new research across a number of disciplines. Rather than indicating a hybrid culture caught in between two nations, the hyphen in 'Turkish-German' serves as a point of departure for an investigation into the history of relations between Turkey and Germany (and, by extension, the East and West) and into the formation of German and Turkish national and ethnic communities.

Turkish-German Studies engages specifically with the construction of ethnic identity and its relationship to culture and religion. It is interested in how class, gender, religious, and cultural relations function as race relations in the postwar period. One of the goals of this field, for example, is to show what contributed to the rise of racial violence in Germany in the 1990s and discuss how these incidents provoked legal changes to migration, the right to asylum, and the process of naturalizing immigrants. The field offers an insight into institutionalized forms of racism and the ways in which Germanness is constructed in fundamental ways through racial and ethnic politics. Thus, Turkish-German Studies pursues questions concerning the nexus between nation, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and religion in postwar Germany.

The study of Turkish-German relations calls for a multidisciplinary, if not interdisciplinary approach that encourages academic collaboration between specialists in German studies, Turkish studies, history, literary criticism, anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, linguistics, political sciences, and sociology. The field evaluates various approaches to cultural productions by ethnic communities in Germany and its implications for the concept of German culture. It is based on the work of scholars like Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Ann McClintock, Arjun Appadurai, Raymond Williams, Frantz Fanon and Etienne Balibar. The field is specifically informed by the work of scholars in German Studies who focus on issues of race and ethnicity in the postwar period: Leslie Adelson, Ülker Gökberk, Deniz Göktürk, Azade Seyhan, Levent Soysal, and Yasemin Soysal, to list only a few.

The first scholars in the US to recognize the significance of Turkish immigration to Germany were literary critics in German departments. Given the changing German literary landscape, these critics call for new reading strategies that are able to capture newly emerging textual and cultural practices. Leading German Studies journals such as New German Critique, Seminar, and The German Quarterly have in the past decade published numerous articles on Turkish-German literature and maintain a lively forum for redefining German Studies in relation to the changing cultural landscape in Germany. The term 'Turkish-German literature' comprises those literary texts originating within German-speaking countries written in the German language by authors with a Turkish background. The term is also related but does not necessarily overlap with what Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari dubbed 'minor literature' and Leslie Adelson 'literature of migration'. Literary critics of Turkish-German literature call international attention to the contribution of this literary corpus to not only German but also world literature. Thus, Turkish-German Studies promises to be instructive for scholarship on world-wide migration, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, and identity politics in other national contexts.

In addition to the Turkish-German focus, the field is understood as a forum for debate about broader processes of transnational migration and racialization in the modern German context.  More than showing the ways in which Turkish-Germans are constructed as Other, Turkish-German Studies emphasizes the diversity of artistic expressions that stems from other communities which are marked by the history of migration and exile: ethnic Germans, African-Germans, Arab-Germans, Jewish-Germans and Romani-Germans. Research in the field highlights the interrelationship between these groups without confining itself to a restricted notion of identity politics.

Kader Konuk, University of Michigan

The Turkish-German Studies Group at the University of Michigan, the first of its kind in the international academic scene, brings together scholars not only concerned with the impact of Turkish migration to Germany, but also with cross-cultural Turkish German encounters in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. Faculty and graduate students involved in the group study cultural exchanges, intellectual history, political alliances, knowledge transfers, postcolonialism, migration, exile, citizenship, nation building, bilingualism concerning a diverse German society.

The University of Michigan hired a significant number of faculty who specialize in Turkish German Studies, a field that has become one of the most stimulating in German Studies. Recognizing this unique opportunity, twelve faculty members and graduate students in German, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Sociology, History, Political Science, Architecture, Linguistics, Near Eastern Studies, the Center for African and African-American Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and the Residential College founded the Turkish German Studies Group in the Fall of 2001.

The group builds the foundations for a sustained dialogue between scholars, artists, and academics at the University of Michigan and those in Europe. This is particularly important given the distinctive configuration of scholars at the University of Michigan and the dearth of this type of collaboration at either German or Turkish Universities. The group is unique in both the range of expertise represented by the group and in the ways in which it seeks to explore dimensions of on-going cultural and linguistic contact between Germany and Turkey. It is also unique in its dedication to a sustained, international conversation about Turkish German issues that involves a broad cross-section of people outside the academy, including writers, artists, and political activists.

The group was conceived as a forum for sharing ideas and presenting work in progress and has sustained regular lively and multidisciplinary exchanges between group members and guests over the past three years. With the support of a broad range of departments, centers, and programs, the group organized lecture series and workshops with writers and academics including German Studies scholars Leslie Adelson (Cornell University) and Nina Berman (Ohio State University), anthropologist Jenny White (Boston University), Turkish-German author and journalist Zafer Senocak, Turkish-German filmmaker Neco Çelik, and African-German filmmaker Branwen Okpako.

One of the major goals of the group is to raise fundamental questions about the future of Turkish German Studies and to reflect on its current timeliness. The group provides an ideal setting for graduate students and faculty to exchange ideas about the main agendas, parameters and new theoretical insights that the field as a whole can offer.

With the support of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Program in Comparative Literature, the Department of Anthropology, the Residential College, and the International Institute, the group also sponsors a lecture series.

Past speakers include:

• Leslie Adelson (Dept. of German, Cornell University): "The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Towards a New Critical Grammar of Migration"
• Nina Berman (Dept. of German, Ohio State University): "Modernizing Egypt: A Turkish-German Development Project"
• Jenny White (Anthropology, Boston University): "Turks and other Others in the New Germany"
• Zafer Senocak (Turkish-German writer and journalist): Public reading

Rita Chin (Asst. Professor, History). Rita Chin's research focuses on the multiple effects of the postwar "guest worker" migration on German society and culture. She is currently finishing a book entitled The Guest Worker Question: Debating Diversity in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1955-1990. Email: rchin@umich.edu

Karein Goertz (Lecturer, Geman and the Residential College).

Gottfried Hagen (Asst. Professor, Near Eastern Studies). Gottfried Hagen is an Ottomanist who has studied the German-Turkish alliance in World War I, and has also worked extensively on geographical literature and travelogues, including the mutual perceptions of Germans and Turks.

Kader Konuk (Asst. Professor, German and Comparative Literature): Kader Konuk's Identitäten im Prozeß, published by Blaue Eule in 2001, takes a comparative approach to German, Turkish, and American literature by contemporary women authors from Turkey: Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Güneli Gün, and Latife Tekin. Contesting the presentism that dominates the study of German-Turkish relations, her work also explores the historical connections between Germany and Turkey. Kader Konuk’s present book project explores the intellectual contribution of German and German-Jewish scholars such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer to Turkish universities (1933-1950). Email konuk@umich.edu

Damani Partridge (Asst. Professor, Anthropology and Center for African and African-American Studies). Email: djpartri@umich.edu

Robin Queen (Asst. Professor, German and Lingusitics): Robin Queen's research focuses on bilingualism among Turkish-German children and young adults, with a specific emphasis on trajectories of contact-induced language change. Recent articles on this issue include: "Intonational in Contact: Evidence from Turkish-German bilinguals" (Language in Society 30:1) and "Language ideology and political economy among Turkish-German bilinguals in Germany." In When languages collide, Brian Joseph, Neil Jacobs et al., eds. (Columbus, OH: OSU Press). Email: rqueen@umich.edu

Graduate Students

Adile Esen (Graduate Student, German: aedel@umich.edu). Adile Esen's interests are primarily in the German-Turkish dialogue and the literature of the 1990s. Her main focus is Emine Sevgi Özdamar. She is also interested in the contribution of Turkish artists to the visual and theatrical arts in contemporary Germany.

Susan Buettner (Graduate Student, German; susansb@umich.edu)

Didem Ekici (Graduate Student, Architecture; dekici@umich.edu)

Ela Gezen (Graduate Student, German; egezen@umich.edu)

Asli Gür (Graduate Student, Sociology; agur@umich.edu)

Joshua Hawkins (Graduate Student, German: jrchawk@umich.edu)