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Detecting Ethnicity: Jakob Arjouni and the Case of the Missing German Detective Novel
Ist Teil von
The German quarterly, 1999-07, Vol.72 (3), p.265-289
Ort / Verlag
Philadelphia, etc: American Association of Teachers of German
Erscheinungsjahr
1999
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
In this essay I am concerned broadly with the problem of the hardboiled detective novel in Germany and its connections to German discourses of criminality, citizenship, and identity. My point of entry is the astounding appearance of Jakob Arjouni's Turkish German p.i., Kemal Kayankaya, in a series of popular detective novels from the late 1980s and early 1990s-astounding, because the existence of such a hero, I argue, has been largely precluded by traditions of literary genre, national identity, and law enforcement in Germany. I go on to investigate the obsession with identity governing critics' reactions to both Kayankaya and Arjouni and show how Arjouni's novels work to confound identity and to debunk essentialist notions of Germanness. The poverty of the hardboiled detective novel genre in Germany, I suggest, is linked to the absence of notions of ambiguity and fluidity in German views of identity and origin.