Atlas of a Tropical Germany

"Germany long ago became part of us German Turks," Zafer Senocak observes. "Are we also a part of Germany?" Gathered here for the first time in English translation, these essays chart a new orientation for German life, culture, and politics beyond the Cold War and at the dawn of an unprecedented era. The 1990s began with national unification between East and West and closed with a radical liberalization of German citizenship law; many questions about the largest minority in this multicultural Germany have yet to be asked. This decade also reeled with war in the Persian Gulf and "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans. As Germans imagine themselves as westerners interacting with Muslim populations at home and abroad, these essays acquire a critical urgency. Senocak reconfigures the Turkish diaspora and the German nation by mapping a "tropical Germany."

Zafer Senocak was born in 1961 in Ankara, Turkey, but has lived primarily in Berlin and Munich since 1970. One of the most insightful intellectuals in Germany today, Senocak in the last decade has often focused on German politics and culture, particularly as they relate to the increasingly multicultural dimensions of contemporary German life. He is a frequent contributor to several leading German newspapers. Professor and chair of German Studies at Cornell University, Leslie A. Adelson is the author of Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity (Nebraska 1993), winner of the Modern Language Association's Scaglione Prize.