Yadé Kara’s debut novel Selam Berlin (2003), which, as Moray McGowan observes, ‘exemplifies Turkish-German writing’s establishment as a marketable commodity’, can be read in a number of ways: as a post-unification Berlin novel and the first Turkish-German ‘unification novel’, as pop novel, as chick-lit novel with a twist, as picaresque novel, and, above all, as a self-consciously transnational novel. Because Selam Berlin is written in a colloquial style to reflect the protagonist’s age and irreverent attitude, it is fun to read, making it easy to overlook its playful irony and self-referential qualities. Moreover, the fact that it makes many textual references, particularly to recent Turkish-German fiction and film as well as to the mainstream Berlin fiction mentioned later in this chapter, is not immediately obvious. Before focusing on the transnational features of Kara’s novel, I briefly consider the other literary contexts in which it can be read.

The years since German unification have witnessed a remarkable boom in literature set in Berlin by authors from both East and West, including those with a migration background, and from all generations. Yet Phil C. Langer notes that in the years following the fall of the Wall no members of the ‘younger’ generation of Turkish-German writers had chosen Berlin as a setting. Langer believes that the irrelevance of the ‘Berlin myth’, a discursive context marked as German, is the reason for these writers’ alleged lack of interest in the rapidly changing city. This reductive interpretation of the Turkish-German position as that of always already being outside or Other stands out in Langer’s otherwise perceptive reading of Berlin novels of the 1990s. The literary interest in Berlin that several second-generation Turkish-German writers, including Zafer Şenocak in Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Perilous Kinship, 1998), Feridun Zaimoğlu in German Amok (2002) and Kara, have expressed shows that, in the imagination of these writers, post-unification Berlin is certainly not interchangeable with Frankfurt, Kassel or Bielefeld as Langer suggests. In these texts, Berlin signifies more than mere geographical setting. The interest of German-Turkish writers in Berlin also confirms, to cite Leslie Adelson, that ‘Germans and Turks in Germany share more culture (as an ongoing imaginative project) than is often presumed when one speaks of two discrete worlds encountering each other across a civilizational divide’. The fictional treatment of Berlin in Kara’s text, whose action spans the time between the day of the opening of the Berlin Wall and the day of German unification, is exemplary of the new ways in which Turkish-German writing has emerged as a participant in the ‘Berlin myth’. The significance of Selam Berlin as the first Turkish-German Wenderoman – that is, a novel concerned with the immediate phenomenon of the fall of the Wall and its ramifications for the protagonist’s life – puts it in the company of other novels that mark what McGowan has called a ‘turning point’ in Turkish-German writing. In his view, the first turning point was the publication of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge (Mother Tongue) in 1990 and the award of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1991 for her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai (Life is a Carawanserai, Has Two Doors, I Came in One, I Went Out the Other, 1992). The second was the publication of Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak (Wop Speak, 1995) ‘which together with the author’s media presence brought Turkish-German writing to an entirely new audience’. I would argue that Selam Berlin marks a third turning point by successfully addressing the most salient topics in German history such as the Holocaust, the German–Jewish relationship, the German student movement, and unification within a transnational context, and by using some of the strategies of pop literature.