SABINE VON DIRKE

Today close to six million foreigners--
mostly migrant laborers--live perma-
nently in Germany, exploding the homo-
geneity of German culture. Current
xenophobic outbreaks give sad evidence
of this fact. Though German writers
were at the forefront in condemning such hate crimes,
foreigners have been by and large absent from their lit-
erary production. If they do occasionally appear, they
are not discussed in their own right but remain marginal
to the German protagonist's story. ² Literature has in the
past simply reduplicated the marginal status of foreign-
ers, especially migrant workers, in German society and
politics. With respect to their literary production, Ger-
man authors can, therefore, be criticized for their "dis-
acknowledgement of another's presence by silence,"
which according to Azade Seyhan constitutes "an act of
oppression.''³ Sten Nadolny's 500-page novel Selim
oder Die Gabe der Rede, ⁴ published in 1990, breaks this
silence. One of its heroes is a Turkish migrant worker
whose name features prominently in the title and refers
to his talent: Selim's tremendous communicative skills,
his ability to resolve problems through speech, or more
precisely through telling stories. His counterpart, a
young German named Alexander, lacks exactly this
skill, which is one of his major problems. This par-
ticular constellation of protagonists--the friendship be-
tween the native German and the foreign Turk--renders
Nadolny's third novel interesting with respect to two
major cultural issues of the 1980s: first, ethnicity and
multiculturalism, and second, the discourse on post-
modernism and postmodernity.

Majority representations of minorities in the public
sphere are important for the success of multicul-
turalism. Well-intended arguments promoting the idea
of Germany as a multicultural society have constructed
the foreigners mainly as fill-ins for the demographically
declining native population. This line of argument usu-
ally refers to the overaged German population and its
consequences for the future, such as the lack of con-
tributors to social security or the need for foreign labor
to care for the aging Germans. ⁵ Using the same param-
eters as government and industry--economic advan-
tages of labor migration for Germany--this reasoning
feeds into the stereotypical perception of the foreigner
as disposable, cheap labor. The economic argument is
therefore a highly questionable effort of promoting
crosscultural understanding, or, in other words, for
multiculturalism. Though well intended, its economic
functionalism resembles the logic of the term Gastarbei-
ter (guest worker) used for foreign resident aliens. It ad-
dresses the issue of cultural difference as little as the
term guest worker does, which establishes a host-guest
relationship between Germans and alien workers.
Guests and hosts can, however, ignore the question of
cultural differences because of the temporal nature of
their relationship.

This was indeed the case during the first fifteen years
of labor migration to Germany. After the recruitment
ban imposed by the government in 1973, the host-guest
relationship was, however, tipped off balance. The for-
eigners brought their families to the host country, and
labor migration turned into de facto immigration. The
foreign presence became more and more visible: Turk-
ish women with headscarves appeared on the streets and
children of foreigners appeared in the German schools.
These resident aliens also meant new demands for social
responsibility on the part of the communities, the indi-
vidual states, and the federal government, including
special classes (German as a foreign language or classes
in the respective native languages), or representation of
foreigners on the community councils. The govern-
ment, however, consistently reiterated only its position
that the Federal Republic of Germany is not an immi-
gration country. The German perception of the foreign-
ers could thus easily change from their ignored tempo-
rary status as a reserve labor army to a negative one as
the foreign intruder. In other words, the migrant worker
was all of a sudden negatively recognized as the foreign
Other who challenges German ways of life. The Ger-
mans' problem with the incorporation of Others into
the native community results, as Ruth Mandel points
out, from the challenge to "the underpinnings of Ger-

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