Abstract

Whereas language constitutes one key vessel of historical remembering, the act of translation in Zafer Şenocak’s 2008 novel Köşk (The Pavilion) reveals how modern Turkish has also enabled historical forgetting, in its assertion of a monolingual Turkish populace over and against the multiethnic and multilingual makeup of the Ottoman Empire. Through an emphasis on the tropes of absence and translational reversal, Köşk then brings the history of linguistic modernization in Turkey to bear on contemporary integration policy and an implicit ethnicization of the German language in the Federal Republic of Germany. In doing so, it asks implicit questions about who has the right to speak a language as a nonethnic subject, and to remember a “national” past as both a noncitizen and a nonresident.

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