Yildiz, Yasemin
Beyond the mother tongue: the
postmonolingual condition
New York : Fordham University Press, 2012
TABLE OF CONTENTS
introduction : Beyond the Mother Tongue?
chapter one The Uncanny Mother Tongue
chapter two The Foreign in the Mother Tongue
chapter three Detaching from the Mother
Tongue
chapter four Surviving the Mother Tongue
chapter five Inventing a Motherless Tongue
conclusion : Toward a Multilingual Paradigm?
End Matter
Notes
Works Cited
Index
introduction: Beyond the Mother Tongue?
Multilingual Practices and the Monolingual Paradigm
DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823241309.003.0001
Abstract
The introduction provides the historical and conceptual backdrop to the argument that
monolingualism is a more recent phenomenon than multilingualism and elaborates on the notion of
the “postmonolingual condition.” It charts the emergence of the monolingual paradigm in lateeighteenth-century
Europe, with emphasis on the conceptual impact of the thought of Herder and
Schleiermacher. The chapter also provides a brief history of the term “mother tongue” and discusses
feminist, media theoretical, and psychoanalytic perspectives on this concept before offering a new
reading of it as a “linguistic family romance.” It situates the present study in relationship to literary
and linguistic scholarship on multilingualism, as well as in relationship to German, German-Jewish,
and Turkish-German Studies. Through an analysis of the conceptual artwork Wordsearch: A
Translinguistic Sculpture by artist Karin Sander, the chapter argues for the importance of a critical
approach to multilingualism that takes the monolingual paradigm into account, even in an age of
globalization and transnational flows.
Keywords: family romance, Friedrich Schleiermacher, German-Jewish, globalization, Johann
Gottfried Herder, Karin Sander, monolingualism, mother tongue, multilingualism, Turkish-
German
Rethingking Monolingualism
On September 29, 2002, the Sunday issue of the New York Times included a sixty-eight-page paid
insert previewing a conceptual artwork calledWordsearch: A Translinguistic Sculpture conceived by
German artist Karin Sander and sponsored by the Deutsche Bank, the world's biggest corporate art
collector.1
In response to the sponsor's request to offer a global perspective in a metropolitan
location, Sander's project set out to document as many of the languages spoken in New York City as
possible. It did so by finding one native speaker for each of 250 languages and asking each speaker
to contribute one personally meaningful word in his or her “mother tongue” to a list. This list of
unduplicated words was then translated into all the other languages. The resulting 62,500 words
were arranged into columns resembling stock market tables and published as the actual
“translinguistic sculpture” in another paid, eight-page insert in the business section of the New York
Times on October 4, 2002. This commissioned artwork, Wordsearch, thus sought to render the
novelty of globalized life at the turn of the millennium (p. 2 ) through attention to the proximate
coexistence of many languages in the same space.
To Wordsearch and many other cultural texts, the phenomenon of multilingualism appears as a
remarkable new development of the globalized age.2
Yet as linguists have come to agree, and as
scholars in other fields increasingly document, multilingualism is and has been far more common
worldwide than had been previously acknowledged.3
Indeed, it is monolingualism, not
multilingualism, that is the result of a relatively recent, albeit highly successful, development.4
But a
monolingual paradigm, which first emerged in late-eighteenth century Europe, has functioned to
obscure from view the widespread nature of multilingualism, both in the present and in the past.
While scholars across different fields have noted the “monolingual bias” or the “monolingual habitus”
in particular areas, no study to date has spelled out the far-reaching implications of this
insight.5
Recognizing the workings of the monolingual paradigm, I suggest, requires a fundamental
reconceptualization of European and European-inflected thinking about language, identity, and
modernity. For monolingualism is much more than a simple quantitative term designating the
presence of just one language. Instead, it constitutes a key structuring principle that organizes the
entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities
to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as of imagined collectives such as cultures
and nations. According to this paradigm, individuals and social formations are imagined to possess
one “true” language only, their “mother tongue,” and through this possession to be organically linked
to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nation. Indeed, as we will see, even an
apparently multilingual artwork such as Wordsearch still functions according to the central precepts
of the monolingual paradigm.
The pressures of this monolingual paradigm have not just obscured multilingual practices across
history; they have also led to active processes of monolingualization, which have produced more
monolingual subjects, more monolingual communities, and more monolingual institutions, without,
however, fully eliminating (p. 3 ) multilingualism. Schooling has been one of the primary means of
such a social engineering of monolingual populations.6
The diverse linguistic landscape of
eighteenth-century France, where large parts of the population did not speak French, for instance,
was reengineered over time to produce a more monolingual population of French speakers.7
This
last point also underscores the significance of the modern nation-state for the monolingual paradigm,
or rather, of the monolingual paradigm for the modern nation-state, with which it emerged at the
same time.8
There are signs, however, that the tide is turning against such strict monolingualization. For a
supranational entity such as the European Union, for instance, the challenge has become to manage
multilingualism, not to discard it.9
Increased migration and mobility, the advance of communication
technologies, and the spread of media have also contributed to the sense that multiple languages
coexist and interact in new constellations, a sense that an artwork such as Wordsearch reflects and
contributes to. Even English-dominated domains such as the global entertainment industry see new
linguistic diversity. Hollywood movies such as Babel and Inglorious Basterds or globally consumed
American TV shows such as Lost and Heroes have begun to feature more languages accompanied
by subtitles, while popular musical forms mixing languages have tempted audiences with “livinʼ la
vida loca.”10
An increasing number of language memoirs thematize life in multiple languages as a
significant experience.11
Literary and cultural studies scholars, meanwhile, have begun to make both
older and newer forms of multilingualism visible.12
Yet this new visibility of multilingualism is not
simply due to its more frequent practice, since forms of multilingualism have existed all along.
Rather, globalization and the ensuing renegotiation of the place of the nation-state have begun to
loosen the monolingualizing pressure and have thereby enabled the contestatory visibility of these
practices in the first place, albeit still in circumscribed fashion.13
Multilingualism, then, has not been
absent in the last couple of centuries, but it has been and continues to be refracted through the
monolingual paradigm. (p. 4 ) This persistence of a monolingual framework, I argue, is the backdrop
against which we need to see today's seeming increase in multilingualism.
To capture this ongoing dominance of the monolingual as well as the incipient moves to overcome it,
I introduce the term “postmonolingual.” This “post” has, in the first place, a temporal dimension: it
signifies the period since the emergence of monolingualism as dominant paradigm, which first
occurred in late eighteenth-century Europe. Such a historicized understanding underscores the
radical difference between multilingualism before and after the monolingual paradigm, a difference
that previous studies have neglected.14
This historicization is necessary, I argue, because the
appearance of the monolingual paradigm substantially changes the meaning and resonance of
multilingual practices.15
But since the monolingual paradigm has spread only gradually and unevenly
across different contexts and not at all to others, “postmonolingual” constitutes by necessity a
situated and flexible periodization, inflected by contextual differences.16
This flexibility of the term
also means that it is not limited to one geographic area—in this case, Europe—but may extend to
other contexts as well, whenever monolingualism becomes a dominant form.17
It is in this sense that
the present book should be understood as a study of the workings of the monolingual paradigm and
multilingual attempts to overcome it, rather than as a study of multilingualism per se. Viewed through
this—flexible—temporal lens, “postmonolingual” refers to the unfolding of the effects of the
monolingual and not to its successful overcoming or transcendence. But besides the temporal
dimension, the prefix “post” also has a critical function, where it refers to the opposition to the term
that it qualifies and to a potential break with it, as in some notions of postmodernism. In this second
sense, “postmonolingual” highlights the struggle against the monolingual paradigm. As Marianne
Hirsch notes with regard to the “post” in her own term “postmemory,” the prefix “reflects an uneasy
oscillation between continuity and rupture” (“The Generation of Postmemory” 106).
(p. 5 ) Taking these dimensions together, “postmonolingual” in this study refers to a field of tension
in which the monolingual paradigm continues to assert itself and multilingual practices persist or
reemerge. This term therefore can bring into sharper focus the back-and-forth movement between
these two tendencies that characterizes contemporary linguistic constellations. Focusing on the
tension rather than on one or the other pole helps to account for many phenomena that initially
appear to be contradictory. Early twentieth-century Prague, where Kafka lived, for instance,
becomes graspable as both a multilingual space in which multiple languages coexisted and as a
place rapidly transitioning to a monolingual structure with individuals increasingly embracing only
one, ethnically predetermined language. As Emily Apter demonstrates in her book The Translation
Zone, the complex entanglements of language(s) with culture and politics demand such a focus on
tensions, struggles, and “language wars.” This definition of the postmonolingual condition indicates
also that in the primarily European context on which this study focuses, the opposite of the
monolingual paradigm—that is, a multilingual paradigm that would restructure perceptions and social
formations along new lines after monolingualism—does not yet truly exist. Yet imaginative works in
literature and other fields suggest the possible contours of such a multilingual paradigm and
contribute variously to just such a restructuring, as I demonstrate throughout this book.
Because the German tradition has played an important role in establishing the monolingual
paradigm, Beyond the Mother Tongue focuses on German-language writers who are uncomfortably
positioned within the paradigm and have thus had to grapple with it to a significant degree. This
group includes pre-and post-Holocaust German-Jewish figures, such as Franz Kafka and Theodor
W. Adorno, and contemporary writers from new immigrant communities, such as Turkish-Germans
Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoğlu, as well as the unique case of bilingual JapaneseGerman
author Yoko Tawada.18
Using a range of multilingual forms to bring German into contact with
a series (p. 6 ) of other languages, from Yiddish, French, Latin, and English, to Japanese, Afrikaans,
Arabic, and Turkish, these authors provide a privileged position from which to explore the strictures
of the monolingual paradigm and evaluate the means of reimagining the identitarian force of
language. As this list of languages begins to indicate, even though “German” is the common
denominator for all the writers considered, their multilingual connections open up paths to other
languages and histories across the globe and resituate German itself in the process. To recognize
the possibilities and pitfalls of multilingualism, however, requires the postmonolingual mode of
reading that this book offers—a mode of reading attuned both to the existence of multilingual
practices and to the continued force of the monolingual paradigm.
Emergence of a Paradigm
Emerging only in the course of the eighteenth century at the confluence of radical political,
philosophical, and cultural changes in Europe, the notion of monolingualism rapidly displaced
previously unquestioned practices of living and writing in multiple languages.19
“Exclusive first
language allegiance […] was not the most desired of linguistic identities or imagined communities in
the late medieval period,” Mary Davidson notes with regard to Chaucer and his contemporaries
(Medievalism 137). This attitude extended to the political realm where it was of little concern to
premodern rulers whether and how their subjects spoke one or more languages. They themselves
did not necessarily privilege the local language either. As late as the 1780s, King Friedrich II of
Prussia famously preferred to speak and write in French, while harshly dismissing German. With the
gendered and affectively charged kinship concept of the unique “mother tongue” at its center,
however, monolingualism established the idea that having one language was the natural norm, and
that multiple languages constituted a threat to the cohesion of individuals and societies. Even as
they supported the study of other languages, late eighteenth-century German thinkers such as
Johann Gottfried (p. 7 ) Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schleiermacher spearheaded
the view that one could properly think, feel, and express oneself only in one's “mother tongue.” This
notion of the mother tongue has been in turn a vital element in the imagination and production of the
homogenous nation-state.
Philosophically, a new conception of language prepared the way for this conjunction of language and
nation. As linguistic anthropologist Susan Gal argues, it was only in the Enlightenment era and the
subsequent Romantic reaction to it that language came to be considered as an object with particular
attributes (“Migration” 14). In this conception, which largely persists to this day, “a language” is a
clearly demarcated entity that has a name, is countable, and is the property of the group that speaks
it, while also revealing that group's idiosyncrasies.20
This reified conception of language enabled the
distinction between mono-and multilingualism. It also relegated linguistic practices without proper
names to the status of deviation, hodgepodge, or simply invisibility, rather than recognizing them as
“language.”21
With German thinkers at the forefront, the eighteenth century also witnessed the highly
consequential political linkage of language and nation. Herder was one of the key figures to pave the
way for this view. He celebrated the distinctness of each language, which he saw as emanating from
the genius of a particular nation (Volk).22
On the one hand, this perspective led to a greater
recognition and appreciation of the multiplicity of languages. On the other hand, Herder insisted on
the need to maintain the distinctness of these national languages lest they lose their authenticity and
rootedness in their respective nations. He thus conceived of both languages and their speakers as
more separate and different from each other than had previously been the case. Herder did
therefore not abandon multilingualism in so far as it meant appreciation of many languages, but
rather reworked it in relation to the new vision of language, subject, and nation. The multiplication of
languages is not an issue for this Herderian view as long as each language is conceived as distinct
and separate and as belonging to just one equally distinct and separate people. What (p. 8 ) this
position cannot abide is the notion of blurred boundaries, crossed loyalties, and unrooted
languages.23
This changing attitude towards language(s) finds a clear articulation in the field of translation.24
While
previously a “universalist” conception of languages prevailed, now a “relativist” perspective began to
take hold.25
The universalist conception, dominant until the eighteenth century, deemed languages to
be essentially equivalent and their specific forms only an irrelevant surface feature compared to the
more important aspect of the content of any text. The relativist perspective, on the other hand, saw
languages as radically different from each other in their specificities and their makeup. In this new
vision, translation no longer merely transported content from one form into an equivalent form
without damage, but rather necessarily transformed the content in the process. Wilhelm von
Humboldt's suggestion that languages were not a neutral media but rather inflected the thoughts
they expressed was influential in this regard.26
With this greater attention to form came also a greater
sense of the difference of languages and their distance from each other. At the extreme end of this
relativist view, languages were essentially seen as untranslatable and closed off from each other.
This new perspective not only drew attention to each language's specificity, but also to the
individual's relationship to his or her—presumably singular—primary language. That relationship was
now seen as more internal and innate, and also more circumscribed by inheritance and nationality.
In his influential 1813 lecture on translation, Schleiermacher provides the image for this new model,
while contrasting it to an older one:
For whoever acknowledges the creative power of language, as it is one with the character of the
nation [Eigentümlichkeit des Volkes], must also concede that […] no one adheres to his language
only mechanically, as if it were something externally attached to him like a strap and as if one could
as easily harness another language for one's thought as one would exchange a team of horses
[Gespann]; rather, every writer can produce original work only in his mother (p. 9 ) tongue
[Muttersprache], and therefore the question cannot even be raised how he would have written his
works in another language. (“Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens” 85; “From On the
Different Methods of Translating” 50, trans. modified)
Schleiermacher introduces the image of interchangeable straps and harnessed horses to reject the
view of languages as external, indiscriminate means for transporting individuals from one place to
another. In a metaphoric move that is characteristic for the period and indicates changing
philosophical paradigms, he replaces this mechanistic image of speakers' relation to language with
an organic one.27
The counterimage to the mechanistic view is encapsulated in the reference to the
“mother tongue.” Schleiermacher does not elaborate on this image in the same manner in which he
provides an extended metaphor for the rejected view. The “mother tongue” functions as a shorthand
that barely needs explication. In this shorthand, the weight of the argument falls on the element of
“mother” in Muttersprache. It stands for a unique, irreplaceable, unchangeable biological origin that
situates the individual automatically in a kinship network and by extension in the nation.28
In contrast
to the mobility implied by the harnessed horses, the “mother”—a markedly gendered kinship
concept—stresses a static mode of belonging to the national collective. Schleiermacher does not
need to elaborate that one cannot willfully change one's mother like one can a team of horses; this
point appears self-evident and underscores the effectiveness of the chosen metaphor.
The uniqueness and organic nature of language imagined as “mother tongue” lends its authority to
an aesthetics of originality and authenticity. In this view, a writer can become the origin of creative
works only with an origin in a mother tongue, itself imagined to originate in a mother. The result is a
disavowal of the possibility of writing in nonnative languages or in multiple languages at the same
time.29
By the mid-nineteenth century, this position has become a truism, as borne out by composer
Richard Wagner's assertion that “to make poetry in a foreign tongue has (p. 10 ) hitherto been
impossible, even to geniuses of highest rank” (Das Judentum in der Musik 150; tr. Judaism in
Music 85).30
Such a “retrospective monolingualization of the West European literary system, based
on the Romantic stress on the mother tongue as the primary material for literary creation,” as decried
by translation scholar André Lefevere (“Translated Literature” 76), effects a historical amnesia about
all earlier multilingual configurations while it seeks to deter future turns to any language other than
the solely sanctioned “mother tongue.”
The Mother Tougue: A Linguistic Family Romance
The “mother tongue” is the affective knot at the center of the monolingual paradigm and therefore a
knot worth unraveling. This knot relies heavily on the invocation of the maternal, without however
necessarily referencing actual mothers.31
As the discussion of Schleiermacher begins to illustrate,
the “mother” in “mother tongue” stands in for the allegedly organic nature of this structure by
supplying it with notions of maternal origin, affective and corporeal intimacy, and natural kinship. Yet
the emotional and ideological connotations of “mother tongue” on which Schleiermacher draws and
with which we are still familiar today are themselves historical artifacts and not transhistorical
constants. Originally a Latin term, lingua materna was used in the Middle Ages and the Early
Modern period to refer to lay people's vernaculars in contrast to learned Latin.32
Muttersprache first
began to be an emotionalized term in the late eighteenth century, when it was newly linked to a
notion of linguistic socialization—that is, at the same time as the monolingual paradigm took shape.
This change itself occurred in the context of larger social and political transformations that produced
new and interrelated conceptions of family, kinship, motherhood, nation, and state. The family, for
instance, only then began to be thought of as consisting solely of biological kin and excluding other
members of the household such as servants. This rethinking corresponded (p. 11 ) to the
reorganization of labor and the household that resulted in a stricter separation of the private and
public realms. The new context defined (bourgeois) motherhood increasingly as the site of affective
care rather than simply physical care.33
It was this image of the bourgeois mother that entered into
the modern “mother tongue” discourse.
That the ensuing constellation of “mother” and “language” continues to be a complicated one is
demonstrated by the diverse perspectives on it among contemporary feminists. Some feminist critics
celebrate the “mother tongue” as bearing residues or traces of the maternal body. Feminists who
view the mother tongue in this manner valorize it as the expression of the repressed and dominated
maternal and set it against male authority.34
Yet, other feminists, working within a psychoanalytic
framework, stress the divergence between the maternal and the linguistic. For instance, some
readings align the maternal with the pre-Oedipal and preverbal. Developed in particular by Julia
Kristeva, this vision sees the maternal as preceding language. Kristeva's proposed structure thus
locates language and the law of the father as separate from the mother, who is “pure bodily
closeness” (Johnson, Mother Tongues 66). A third strand, which guides my approach here, rejects
both of these utopian figurations of the mother. As feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti puts it,
“Lacanian psychoanalysis shows us that there is no such […] thing as a mother tongue, that all
tongues carry the name of the father and are stamped by its register” (Nomadic Subjects 11). For
Braidotti, “mother” does not stand for something outside the law of the father but rather resides
squarely within it. Nevertheless, the mother's body and all that it suggests about affection, proximity,
and presence continues to function implicitly in the still-active concept of the mother tongue.
The complex imbrication of the mother's body with language and male authority is underscored by
media theorist Friedrich Kittler's historical account of the turn to phonetics in literacy
education.35
Around 1800, the bourgeois mother began to be incorporated into the role of teaching
her children to read. Kittier(p. 12 ) demonstrates in great detail how the mother's mouth became the
central conduit in the production of proper sounds in the mother tongue.36
The child was supposed to
see and hear the mother's mouth produce sound at the same time that she pointed to the
corresponding written letter. Thereby, a connection would emerge between the mother's mouth, the
sound, and the letter. The mother, however, was first instructed in textbooks by male experts in how
to produce the sounds properly. Her body was meant to function as a medium for those male
experts in their attempt to control the proper (re)production of language. As this scenario strikingly
demonstrates, the “mother tongue” coming out of a women's mouth was not just any language that a
mother spoke, but rather the result of male ventriloquism. While this technique supported the
ongoing standardization of the language, it also relied on the child's associating the written letter with
the proximity and intimacy of the maternal body.
As this historical account illustrates, the manufactured proximity between “mother” and “language”
stages the fantasy behind the modern notion of the mother tongue—namely, that the mother tongue
emanates from the mother's body. This notion indicates that, within the monolingual paradigm,
“mother tongue” is more than a metaphor. Instead, it constitutes a condensed narrative about origin
and identity. Freud describes origin fantasies that take the shape of narratives in order to give rise to
new subjects as “family romances.” In these family romances, children reimagine parents in a
grandiose manner in order to deflect their growing sense of the parents' ordinariness.37
Using this
basic structure, I propose to read the modern notion of “mother tongue” as a linguistic family
romance. The linguistic family romance helps to fantasize a bodily as well as familial grounding in
language that does not exist, say, in Schleiermacher's image of language as changeable horses
strapped to a carriage. At the same time, this model offers a blueprint for tracing the emergence of
possible alternative family romances that produce different conceptions of the relationship between
languages and subjects and the origins of their affective ties. As we will see, the (p. 13 ) key
elements of this linguistic family romance—namely, affect, gender, and kinship, tied to a story of
origin and identity—reappear in numerous texts, albeit in altered form. Yoko Tawada, for instance,
interpellates a German typewriter as her new “Sprachmutter” (language mother), in an ironic reversal
of the organicist notions of “Muttersprache” (mother language). Time and again, going beyond the
mother tongue towards a potential multilingual paradigm entails rewriting this linguistic family
romance.
The notion of the unique “mother” insists on one predetermined and socially sanctioned language as
the single locus of affect and attachment and thus attempts to obscure the possibility that languages
other than the first or even primary one can take on emotional meaning. However, despite these
strictures, different languages can and do elicit heterogeneous affective investments and emotional
reactions. In fact, as psychoanalyst Jacqueline Amati-Mehler and her colleagues note, new
languages can open up “new intellectual and affective pathways.”38
Such a notion differs from
presumptions that the mother tongue is always the language of emotion and subsequent languages
are merely languages of distance and detachment.39
In the case of Kafka, for instance, French
serves to negotiate a much-needed opening between German and Yiddish, as I demonstrate
in chapter 1. For Özdamar, on the other hand, German is the language in which she successfully
works through trauma that took place in Turkish, her erstwhile “mother tongue” (see chapter 4).
The fact that “mother tongue” is a highly ideological, charged, and misleading term is in some ways
easy to recognize. Yet simply avoiding this term and substituting it with a more neutral one, such as
“first language,” does not in itself resolve the issues tied up in it. The conception of language, origin,
and identity that “mother tongue” marks is very much in effect today, even when the term itself is not
explicitly invoked.40
It is therefore useful to think with this term rather than to ignore it. In fact, I argue
that it is the affectively charged dimension of the “mother tongue” that accounts for the persistence
of the monolingual paradigm and its homologous logic. We thus need to work through (p. 14 ) the
mother tongue and not simply sidestep its force. Viewed from this vantage point, writing “beyond the
mother tongue” does not simply mean writing in a nonnative language or in multiple languages.
Rather, it means writing beyond the concept of the mother tongue.
Situating Beyond the Mother Tongue
The postmonolingual perspective helps to throw a new light on the simultaneous presence and
absence of multilingual dimensions across many disciplines. As Doris Sommer demonstrates in her
important contribution to a “bilingual aesthetics,” multiple languages appear in the margins or even at
the center of many twentieth-century texts from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, literary and
cultural criticism, and political theory, but remain unexplored. She points, for example, to Ludwig
Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, and draws attention to the fact that he seems to explore
every possible language game, but does not ever consider “bilingual games,” although he himself
lived in multiple languages.41
Yet, Wittgenstein's insistence on publishing the German original of his
text in the English edition of his work leads to the bilingualism of his Philosophical Investigations, in
which German and English face each other on opposite pages. Such a “language game” goes
“unremarked while monolanguage games get tireless attention from Wittgenstein,” Sommer
comments (Bilingual Aesthetics 159). With the lens of the present study, Wittgenstein's practice
becomes legible as caught up in the postmonolingual condition. In contrast to scholars such as
Sommer, who emphasize multilingual experimentation alone, this book keeps its focus on the
tension between experimental practices and the dominant paradigm in order to explore why and how
the monolingual persists even in the face of multilingual forays.
This focus on the postmonolingual tension is enabled by the interdisciplinary scholarship of the last
two decades that has brought out the significance of multilingualism, albeit not that of
monolingualism. Since the 1990s, literary and cultural studies (p. 15 ) have begun in earnest to note
multilingualism both in the present and in the past. Because of the amnesia about multilingualism,
the first step has been to reestablish its existence as a widespread phenomenon. Building on the
pioneering but long ignored work of Leonard Forster, contemporary literary scholars have expanded
on his initial archive of multilingualism in literature.42
This has meant collecting diverse forms of
multilingualism—from authors writing in two or more languages (such as Samuel Beckett, Yoko
Tawada), writing in a so-called nonnative language (such as Joseph Conrad, Edwige Danticat), to
mixing different languages in one text (such as James Joyce, Gloria Anzaldúa), to simply being
multilingual, while writing in one language (such as Anita Desai).43
Considering the twentieth century
alone, these archives help to reveal the significance of multilingualism for modernism on the one
hand and for postcolonial and transnational writing on the other. The makeup of Beyond the Mother
Tongue pays heed to both of these realms of multilingual writing, and combines two chapters
exploring a modernist framework (Kafka, Adorno) with three chapters exploring the globalizing
present (Tawada, Özdamar, Zaimoğlu).
However, as this grouping of authors reveals, my archive differs from that of most scholars working
in literary multilingualism. Most significantly, much scholarship on multilingualism focuses on
constellations that involve English. Evelyn Chʼien even goes so far as to claim that “weird English
constitutes the new language of literature” (Weird English 4). Yet “weird German”—a version of
which I will discuss via Zaimoğlu's book Kanak Sprak (Kanak Speak) inchapter 5—and many other
multilingualized languages surely are also producing new literary effects.44
It is also important to
understand that the global circulation of English may even have limiting effects for multilingual
experimentation. Tawada's German and Japanese writing, for instance, frequently builds on the
presumption that her audiences do not understand one of the two languages she uses and therefore
listen to its sounds or consider its forms more closely, a situation that would be radically different if
she wrote in English and Japanese. To be sure, English (p. 16 ) figures as an important element of
multilingualism in other places in this book, such as in its role in defining the place and racialized
masculinity of young male migrants in Germany (chapter5). However, considering constellations that
involve languages other than English also opens up a view of different historical legacies. While the
postcolonial legacy of German continues to be investigated, German has figured more prominently
as a post-Holocaust language.45
Embracing such a “tainted” language and bringing it into contact
with others thus has different connotations, both for Jewish and non-Jewish writers of German,
as chapter 2 demonstrates with regard to the crucial function of the “foreign-derived word” for
Adorno's attachment to the language after Auschwitz. Beyond the Mother Tongue thus aims to
contribute to the decentering of the study of multilingualism as a phenomenon limited to English.
This book's interest in monolingualism is partially inspired by Jacques Derrida and his reflections on
the topic. In his autobiographically informed book,Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of
Origin, which I discuss at greater length in chapter 1, Derrida suggests the exclusionary institutional
force of this concept as well as the inherent fissures that could help unravel it. In his focus on
monolingualism, even if it is the “monolingualism of the Other,” he tends to overlook multilingualism
too completely, however.46
His discussion of German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt's
famous 1964 TV interview “Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache” (What Remains? The Mother
Tongue Remains), for instance, demonstrates this tendency. In that interview with a West German
TV station, Arendt insists on the singularity of the German “mother tongue” and the place it occupies
for her. Just as she attempts to articulate this position, however, she is suddenly at a loss for words
and briefly switches into English.47
This momentary code-switching constitutes a multilingual practice
that slips into the very assertion of the unalterable monolingual core of the subject, and yet it has
until now gone uncommented upon. Derrida beautifully unravels the notion of the singularity of the
mother tongue that Arendt articulates, yet he does not register the multilingual (p. 17 )practice, and
thus postmonolingual tension, that occur at the very moment of articulation.
The institutional nature of monolingualism is a significant aspect of the postmonolingual condition
that other scholars are also beginning to stress. In an important contribution, Brian Lennon draws
attention specifically to the role of the Anglophone trade publishing industry and the ways in which its
conventions stifle the actual expression of “plurilingualism,” his term for the presence of untranslated
words, phrases, and passages from other languages in a text (In Babel's Shadow). To put it in the
terms suggested in the present book, Lennon demonstrates the workings of the monolingual
paradigm in the very publishing of multilingual texts and the ways that industry actively limits the
types of multilingualism that circulate widely in the public sphere. While Lennon's case study of
publishing is a timely intervention, his exclusive focus on plurilingualism as a multilingual form cannot
account for other writing strategies and the particularity of their challenges to the monolingual
paradigm. Beyond the Mother Tongue, in contrast, insists on the necessity of analyzing a range of
forms that multilingual writing can take and of seeing these in their context.48
With its focus on “German” writing, this book not only contributes to the ongoing discussion of
multilingualism in Anglophone literary and cultural studies, but also seeks to recast the German
language both inside and outside German studies as detached from German ethnicity. Instead of
viewing German either as a dominant, oppressive language that is the property of socially
sanctioned, ethnically German subjects or, inversely, as a minor language threatened by global
English, Beyond the Mother Tongue makes visible contradictory, changing, and surprising meanings
that can accrue to the multilingualized language, especially when delinked from ethnicity.49
Even
post-Holocaust German can then become an antitraumatic, healing language in new ways and for
different subjects, as chapter 4 shows.
Because of the long history of Jewish engagements with the German language and the rich tradition
of thinking about Jewish (p. 18 ) multilingualism, (German-) Jewish studies informs the book
throughout.50
As chronicled in chapter 1, neither Jewish multilingualism nor Jewish monolingualism
ever fit easily into the monolingual paradigm. Contemporary reemergent multilingualism can draw
productively on the history of Jewish encounters with the monolingual paradigm, which now appears
as a privileged vantage point. In this regard, “Kafka,” specifically, constitutes both a particular case
of the postmonolingual condition and a shorthand for a linguistic position outside the monolingual
paradigm usefully employed in contemporary contexts. The postmonolingual lens this book offers
may also productively be used to approach other German-Jewish writers than the ones discussed
here. Paul Celan, for instance, famously dismissed the notion of bilingualism in no uncertain terms
and insisted on the singularity of the “mother tongue” for his poetry (“Antwort”). Yet the configuration
of this mother tongue differed significantly from the monolingual ideal: although German was the
language he learned from and spoke with his beloved mother, it was not sanctioned by ethnic,
religious, or national categories. In the end, it was also the language of his mother's murderers. At
the same time, Celan was thoroughly multilingual in many ways: from his multilingual upbringing in
Czernowitz and the fact that he never wrote in a purely monolingually German environment to his
specific multilingual poetic practices. Charting the tension between his monolingual assertion and his
multilingual contexts and practices may illuminate his work in new ways. In his case, voicing
adherence to the monolingual paradigm may even be a case of resistance precisely because he is
not supposed to fit into it.
While notions of Jewish “assimilation into” and “enrichment of” German culture through the use of
the German language had long prevailed in German-Jewish studies, alternative conceptualizations
have been emerging more recently.51
Stephan Braese's study of German as a Jewish language is an
important step in the reimagination of German beyond its status as the allegedly exclusive property
of fully sanctioned, ethnic, Christian German speakers (Eine europäische Sprache). Braese's
account shows (p. 19 ) Jewish speakers of German as active and important agents vis-à-vis the
language rather than as passive assimilators to a readymade product. He thus contributes to a
scholarly decentering of the purely national definition of the German “mother tongue” and provides
evidence for the long-standing function of German as a nonethnic lingua franca.
As the final three chapters of this book argue, this decentering of German is not limited to the
German-Jewish context but extends to contemporary “migratory settings” as well (Aydemir and
Rotas). Expanding Braese's use of the phrase, German may even be a “Turkish” language, or a
“Kurdish” one, just as migrations may have turned Turkish into a “German” language, as I elaborate
in the concluding chapter. The parallels and differences between German-Jewish experiences with
the monolingual paradigm and those of young Turkish-Germans that chapter 5 in particular draws
out also situate the longer Jewish history with German in greater proximity to new globalized
developments in contexts that might at first appear rather distant. Like a number of scholars, I
believe that these two fields are not entirely separate but that cross-connections exist. Following the
lead of Leslie Adelson, this study takes up multilingualism as a site of “touching tales”—that is, as a
site where “things Jewish” and “things Turkish” touch without being equated or translated into each
other (The Turkish Turn 85).52
With two chapters on prominent Turkish-German writers, this book also participates in the field of
Turkish-German studies. Like many other literatures born from migration, Turkish-German literature
does not fit the monolingual paradigm. The majority of Turkish-German authors speak both
languages, albeit with varying fluency. While most do not write in both languages, this multilingual
context is ever-present in the reception of their works, if not their production.53
Scholars have long
been preoccupied with the question of how to classify this literature, using differing labels over the
years.54
If this question continues to be unresolved today, it is not due to a lack of scholarly
agreement, I contend, but rather to the challenge that this literature poses to conceptions (p. 20
)dominated by the monolingual paradigm.55
Existing categorizations are inadequate for literatures
where the language(s) of the author, his or her ethnicity and residence as well as the content and
the language(s) of their texts no longer fit the monolingual equation of language, ethnicity, and
culture. Because of this pronounced yet varied multilingual dimension, Turkish-German literature
offers a fruitful site to investigate the tension between monolingual paradigm and multilingual
practice.
Situating Turkish-German literature in relationship to the postmonolingual condition, in turn, adds a
new analytic framework to the study of this writing, which complements and broadens existing
approaches.56
By shifting the focus to the monolingual paradigm, unexpected constellations and
potential literary affiliations that had heretofore remained obscure can become visible, such as the
ways in which Zaimoğlu's Kanak Sprak relates to Kafka's linguistic situation, on the one hand, and to
James Joyce's literary experiments, on the other. I consider this broadening as contributing to the
project of undoing the “presumption,” critically diagnosed by Adelson, “that Turks figure a cultural
difference and a social reality that are a priori known and knowable only in predetermined ways”
(The Turkish Turn 17).
Among scholars investigating the multilingual dimension of Turkish-German literature, Azade
Seyhan has been most forceful. In Writing outside the Nation, she specifically focuses on diasporic,
exilic, and transnational literatures that are also multilingual in some form, adding a welcome
comparative perspective through the inclusion of U.S. minority literatures alongside Turkish-German
ones. Because of the particular nature of these texts, which frequently thematize loss and
displacement, Seyhan stresses the recuperative power of literature, where cultural memories of a
lost land can be safeguarded and reconfigured. This approach yields valuable insights into some
forms of multilingualism. However, it also risks limiting the understanding of other potential literary
effects. While multilingualism can indeed be used to restore and recuperate loss and memory, it can
also function to liberate from and challenge the mother tongue,(p. 21 ) as this study emphasizes.
More importantly, while “biand multilingualism” are important reference points for Seyhan throughout
her study, her actual analyses do not necessarily highlight multiple linguistic perspectives. In her
readings of Özdamar, to which I return in chapter 4, for instance, Seyhan offers insightful readings of
the Turkish linguistic dimension inherent in Özdamar's literary texts. Yet the impact of the German
dimension of this writing remains absent from her discussion. This book, in contrast, proposes to
think multilingualism in open-ended ways and from multiple vantage points simultaneously.
But how does a postmonolingual mode of reading—that is, a mode of reading that is attentive to
both multilingual practices and the monolingual paradigm—proceed, and what does it reveal? A
return to the artwork that I introduced at the outset demonstrates the productivity of this approach.
Wordsearch: a Postmonolingual Reading
The difficulty of moving into a new multilingual paradigm is exemplified by the artwork Wordsearch. A
closer look at Sander's piece demonstrates that even forms that appear to be highly multilingual may
ultimately follow a monolingual paradigm and thus do not automatically carry an innovative potential.
Most strikingly, Wordsearch's focus on the image of societal multilingualism in a global city, in fact,
rests on a conception of the monolingualism of individuals. The magazine insert, which functions as
the catalogue to the final art piece, features numerous full-page color photographs of individuals in
the midst of their busy workdays as they take a moment to write down their particular words on
pieces of paper. In these pictures, the catalogue highlights the individuals constituting the
multilingual global city as speakers of distinct mother tongues who are effectively associated with
that language only. Although the magazine insert mentions the multilingual competencies of the
pictured individuals (Deutsche Bank Art 28; “Julia […] speaks Tajiki, Russian, and English”), it
identifies them solely with one language, their ostensible (p. 22 ) mother tongue: Julia is introduced
under the heading “Tajiki” and is asked to contribute a word from this one language only. While the
artwork does render the social space as marked by the presence of multiple disparate languages, it
also continues to cast the individual according to a monolingual model where all languages but the
singular mother tongue are treated as secondary and irrelevant.
The claim to the exclusivity of the mother tongue, however, rests on the continued disavowal of
multilingualism. Like Julia, many of the participating individuals actually speak multiple languages, as
the brief notes on the speakers in the catalogue and the accompanying website reveal. Gambian
immigrant Sanna Kanuteh, who contributes a word in the West African language Soninke, for
instance, also speaks “nine languages,” with Soninke just “one of his mother tongues.”57
By denying
what it also acknowledges on the margins, the artwork effects a form of disavowal: “I know very well
that these are speakers of multiple languages but nevertheless I will present them as possessing a
single language only.” This “I know very well, but nevertheless” structure is, of course, the signature
of fetishism. Fetishism, we recall, preserves the wholeness of the mother in order to disavow
castration and lack.58
In the case of the monolingual paradigm, it is the mother tongue whose
wholeness and exclusivity needs to be preserved.
What is at stake in this staging of individuals as primarily monolingual, as defined by their mother
tongue, when at the same time they are posited as the building blocks of a larger multilingual whole?
Throughout the catalogue text, printed in both English and German, the predominantly German
commentators equate language with culture. Sander, for instance, states about the prospective
reader of her translinguistic sculpture: “through the use of his language […] the reader finds his own
culture of origin represented” (“Wordsearch, 2002” 17).59
The reference to “origin” suggests that the
term “culture” is in fact used in the anthropological sense of ethnicity. The prevalence of embassies
and consulates as sources for native speakers for the project extends (p. 23 ) and further
underscores the assumed homology between language, culture, ethnicity, and nationality that
underwrites the project.60
The insistence on identifying the individual with one language only—
namely, the presumed mother tongue—then amounts to the insistence on the continued validity of a
Herderian conception of language. The individual, in other words, becomes the site (or scale) at
which the Herderian conception can be preserved even in the face of globalization.
To understand more fully the stakes behind reestablishing the distinctness of cultures and
ethnicities, it is necessary to turn to another issue thatWordsearch raises but does not explicitly
address. The project is the brainchild of a German artist who realizes it for a nominally German, but
in fact transnational financial institution. To explore the coexistence of multiple languages, she turns
to New York rather than considering a German site. Frankfurt am Main, the bank's headquarters,
would have been a viable alternative as it is one of the country's most diverse, multiethnic, and
multilingual cities.61
Instead, it serves only as a place of reception, where the entire New York
Times issue with the Wordsearch insert was printed by special arrangement and distributed to
pedestrians on the same day. As so often since the nineteenth century, the United States—and New
York in particular—serves as a site for German fantasies about cultural heterogeneity that are
implicitly contrasted with an imagined German homogeneity.62
Wordsearch displaces multilingualism
outside Germany, into a space whose globalized and transnational nature is more readily recognized
and acceptable than that of Germany. The displaced form of the project's multilingualism offers a
safe distance for savoring difference and internal heterogeneity without having to acknowledge it at
home. Ultimately, the assertion of the distinctness and separateness of cultures and ethnicities
attempts to assuage the often-voiced German fears of being leveled by globalization. Rather than
reconfiguring and altering languages, cultures, and ethnicities, the Wordsearch catalogue presents
globalization as preserving and accommodating them harmoniously. The configuration of languages
in this artwork thus carefully (p. 24 ) manages difference by producing it along preserved
homogeneous, ethno-cultural lines and by situating it outside Germany. Multilingualism, in other
words, does not simply constitute a straightforward expression of multiplicity, but rather a malleable
form that can be put to different, and contradictory uses.
Wordsearch itself demonstrates this possibility in its dual form. The catalogue to Wordsearch is after
all only one side of this artwork. The final piece itself lays out an entirely different logic. In contrast to
the emphasis on particularity, cultural origin, and identity in the colorful catalogue, and to its stress
on hand-written, and thus authenticated, words, the final “translinguistic sculpture” itself celebrates
abstraction, universality, and equivalency. The arrangement of the words in stock market tables
suggests that language is a commodity to be traded like any other, while translation becomes the
means of producing equivalency and surplus value. As in a financial dream, the collected words
begin to multiply; through translation, the starting capital of 250 words generates a massive 62,500.
This proliferation differs from heteroglossia by its very orderliness.63
While multilingual environments
generally lead to language contact and thus to new linguistic forms via borrowing and code-mixing,
the words in these stock market columns stay separate and untouched by each other. They too,
thus, reproduce globalization as a process that preserves distinctness. In this case, the unchanged
nature of the words obscures the results of the global financial activity to which the arrangement of
the words refers—namely, the deep-seated transformations such financial activity causes, the
destabilization it brings, and the uneven distribution of wealth to which it leads.
Between the pictures of individuals in the catalogue and the endless columns of words in the verbal
sculpture, Wordsearch performs multilingualism as a fantasy of preserved particularities and
individuality, on the one hand, and as a fantasy of complete equivalency, anonymity, and
unencumbered universality of the financial markets, on the other. Given this perfect self-image of
neoliberal globalization, it may be symptomatic that an (p. 25 ) art critic refers toWordsearch as an
“artwork” and “exhibition” by Sander (Gregory Volk), while a business news report calls it a Deutsche
Bank “integrated advertising campaign” (Business-wire). Through its form, Wordsearch enacts the
tension between reemergent multilingualism and persistent monolingualism that defines the
postmonolingual condition, but it does so in a way that recasts the monolingual paradigm for a new
age and thus retains it.
Outline of the Book
As the example of Wordsearch begins to indicate, the configuration of languages in aesthetic works
shapes how social formations are imagined. That is, the particular form of multilingualism in a given
cultural text encodes visions of social formations, individuals, and modes of belonging. As a result,
the fact that an artwork—or any other cultural production—features multiple languages does not
automatically mean that it stands for pluralism or multiplicity. Not the fact of multiple languages, but
the form in which they are brought together and related to entities such as the social, the individual,
and the affective plane matters. The work of multilingualism in the cultural sphere can thus only be
understood if the particular form it takes is analyzed. Therefore, each of the subsequent chapters
focuses on specific formal strategies of breaking with the premises of monolingualism and evaluates
the promises and shortcomings of those strategies. While these strategies of literary multilingualism
are in the forefront, my analysis also takes into account multilingualism in everyday practices. In
many cases, the texts I examine take everyday practices (such as code-switching) as a starting
point, yet they rework them in different ways. In other words, literary multilingualism may relate to
quotidian, sociolinguistic practices but does not simply reflect them. In contrast to Wordsearch, the
literary and essayistic texts to which I turn in the remainder of the book configure languages in ways
that imagine new formations, subjects, and modes of belonging and, most crucially, offer a more
critical way of dealing (p. 26 ) with the monolingual paradigm. Though the texts that I consider
grapple with the ongoing force of the “mother tongue,” they do so in ways that seek to disrupt the
homology between language and ethno-cultural identity that the paradigm installs. In the process,
they create a wide variety of multilingual aesthetics.
While monolingualism is a quintessentially modern structure, it is modernism that most clearly begins
to unsettle it and that attempts to find ways out of it, even if the language crisis that animates
modernism is generally articulated around “language” in the singular. The first two chapters
of Beyond the Mother Tongue therefore consider authors working within a modernist framework.
Because the book is interested in the force of the monolingual paradigm, however, it focuses on
authors who seem to be indebted to it to some degree. chapter 1 turns to Franz Kafka, who wrote in
one language only, yet nevertheless did not fit easily into the monolingual paradigm because he did
not have a socially sanctioned “mother tongue.” As a Jewish speaker of German in the increasingly
polarized multilingual environment of early twentieth-century Prague, Kafka had to contend with what
Derrida calls the “monolingualism of the Other.” I focus on Kafka's 1911 encounter with the Yiddish
theater, which not only prepared the artistic breakthrough to his mature style, as has been well
documented, but also, I argue, confronted him with a language through which Jews could potentially
inhabit the monolingual paradigm. Although Kafka never considered writing in Yiddish, this chapter
reveals that his writings about that language productively altered his relationship to the German
language and allowed him to express the uncanniness of his “mother tongue.”
chapter 2 takes up a form of multilingualism frequently overlooked in contemporary scholarship in
the field—namely, the presence within a given language of other languages via words of foreign
derivation. Their presence constitutes a form of “internal multilingualism,” as I call it, that inheres in
all languages but that takes on different meanings in different contexts. Foreign-derived words have
long been the objects of charged attacks by language purists, who have treated them as intruders to
be repelled and excised (p. 27 ) from a “mother tongue” held to be pure. With his privileging of the
German language, German-Jewish philosopher Theodor W. Adorno would not seem to be an
obvious choice for thinking about multilingualism. Yet essays such as “Words from Abroad” (1959)
offer important insights into Fremdwörter (words of foreign derivation) as indicative of the tensions of
the postmonolingual condition. Adorno, who grew up at the historical height of chauvinistic antiFremdwort
sentiment in the early twentieth century, explicitly comments on this category at
significant moments in the development of his thought. In Minima Moralia, he memorably
calls Fremdwörter “the Jews of language,” thus suggestively linking linguistic conditions and
historical experiences (200; tr. 110). In reading both his explicit commentary on these “words from
abroad” and his own writing practice in drawing on them, this chapter shows how Adorno held on to
German even after Auschwitz: he redefines the presence of the unassimilated Fremdwort as the
core characteristic of the German language that retains the memory of enforced foreignness and
fundamental alienation. As my chapter demonstrates, moreover, Adorno consistently relies on the
interplay between “native” and “foreign-derived” words as part of his dialectical mode of writing, a
strategy that turns his writing into a critically postmonolingual form.
The next three chapters move from the post-World War II period to the post-Cold War present and to
prominent contemporary writers who embrace a much more visible multilingualism than Kafka or
Adorno. chapter 3 discusses a writer who draws on earlier avant-garde and modernist forms of
writing, yet transforms these in new, globalized ways. It focuses specifically on “bilingual writing,”
defined here as writing and publishing in two (or more) languages.64
Since the late 1980s, Yoko
Tawada has produced two minimally overlapping oeuvres in Japanese and in German, for which she
has been recognized separately in both countries. In contrast to her most famous twentieth-century
predecessors in bilingual writing, Beckett and Nabokov, however, she does not go through periods
of only writing in one of her languages, but rather uses the defamiliarizing effect of constantly (p. 28
) switching between them. As this chapter demonstrates, Tawada's particular multilingual strategies
serve to illuminate and alter a condition not often recognized as problematic—namely,inclusion into
the monolingual paradigm. With Tawada we can see the cost of this inclusion, in addition to the
forms of exclusion illuminated by the other writers.
While Tawada can be described as an expatriate writer in Germany, the last two chapters turn to
multilingual effects coming out of different modalities of movement in the late twentieth-century: exile
and mass migration. As a result of postwar labor recruitment, Germany has become home to a large
resident Turkish community. The last two writers considered both hail from this group, although they
belong to different generations and are differently situated in relationship to the monolingual
paradigm. The striking dimension of Emine Sevgi Özdamar's texts has long been recognized as her
strategy of literally translating Turkish expressions into German, thereby creating a jarring and poetic
effect. This multilingual form, which I refer to as “literal translation” and which has analogues among
postcolonial writers such as Gabriel Okara, has been primarily read as an expression of migration.
My reading of Özdamar's key text “Mutterzunge” (Mother Tongue, 1990), however, reveals a
different underlying issue that this form addresses, which is the traumatic experience of state
violence prior to migration. Özdamar's literal translations both recall and forget that violence in
German and in the process become a means of working through the original trauma, underscoring
the affective possibilities opened up by going beyond the mother tongue.
In contrast to Özdamar and Tawada, who both arrived in Germany as adults and learned (one of)
their literary language(s) belatedly, Feridun Zaimoğlu grew up with two languages from the start, so
that German was never a foreign language to him. Yet it has been difficult for him, as it has for many
nonethnic Germans, to be accepted as a legitimate user of the language by his ethnically German
compatriots, confirming how the monolingual paradigm reproduces ethnically based exclusions.
According (p. 29 ) to this logic, a “Turk” could only ever have Turkish as his mother tongue never
German, and certainly not both. In his bestseller Kanak Sprak (1995), Zaimoğlu responds to this
situation by creating a stylized language inspired by the code-switching creativity of socially
marginalized young Turkish-German men. In a virtuoso performance mixing different codes drawn
from such diverse sources as biblical German, hip-hop English, and Germanized Yiddish to render a
provocative, dense, and highly original language, Zaimoğlu aims to unsettle the exclusionary logic of
the monolingual paradigm by laying claim to a broad linguistic home. His book thus allows a
consideration of the particular multilingual form of “mixed writing”—that is, of featuring multiple
languages within one literary text. The surprising absence of Turkish from this mix, however—an
absence motivated by fear of “feminization”—indicates that even innovative and critical projects of
multilingualism remain haunted by aspects of the paradigm.
The concluding chapter reflects on the political significance of introducing a postmonolingual
analysis today. It takes stock of contradictory developments in contemporary Germany and suggests
a highly “selective” embrace of multilingualism at work. Asking how a critical multilingual paradigm
might look based on the readings developed throughout this book, it finally offers an alternative
conceptualization of the mother tongue that disaggregates linguistic origins, communal belongings,
and affective investments.
Multilingual forms are most productive and promising when they help to change the conceptual
frameworks through which we perceive languages and the arenas in which they circulate. A critical
multilingualism can help open “new affective paths” via linguistic practices not tied to kinship and
ethnic identity. As this book argues throughout, the postmonolingual condition holds this promise,
but without guarantees.
Introduction
1. Wordsearch was realized under the auspices of the Deutsche Bank art series Moment, which
began in 2001 and solicited original conceptual art works (Deutsche Bank Art). It can be partially
viewed on the accompanying website: moment-art.com/moment/wordsearch/e/index.php.
The cover image of the present book is drawn from a photograph of another multilingual artwork, the
mural Le mur des je tʼaime (Wall of I Love Yous) conceived by Frédéric Baron and produced with the
help of calligrapher Claire Kito in 2000. Printed on glazed tile, it features the handwritten phrase “I
love you” in numerous languages in a small park adjacent to the Abbesses metro station in Paris.
Visitors have added their own writings to the wall, thereby changing and expanding the original
pattern. Much of the following analysis of Wordsearch also applies to Le mur des je t'aime. For an
alternate multilingual employment of “I love you,” see the example I discuss in my conclusion.
2. Throughout this book, I use “multilingualism” as an umbrella term that can refer to different
linguistic phenomena involving two or more languages. Each of these phenomena will be separately
described and defined when first mentioned. Such definitions are necessary since there is no
coherent, agreed-upon terminology, either within or across specific disciplines (or languages).
Anglophone linguists, for example, tend to use the term “multilingualism” when referring to language
issues at the macro level (i.e., processes of language change and language death) and
“bilingualism” when referring to language issues involving individual speakers at the micro level (i.e.,
the study of code-switching), although they sometimes also employ these terms to distinguish the
number of languages concerned (Clyne, “Multilingualism”). Literary and cultural studies terminology
is even less settled. It includes the (p. 214 ) traditional “polyglot,” which has usually been reserved
for the linguistic abilities of intellectual elites—think Renaissance humanists—and is closely
associated with elite cosmopolitanism. The more frequent contemporary umbrella terms are
“bilingual” (see Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics;Courtivron, Lives in Translation) and “multilingual”
(see Sollors, Multilingual America; Schmeling and Schmitz-Emans, Multilinguale Literatur). Of these,
“bilingual” may carry a greater political connotation, at least in the United States, as it is associated
with the linguistic situation of immigrants and minorities—think “bilingual education.” Further
coinages with widely varying definitions include but are not limited to “polylingual,” “interlingual,”
“plurilingual,” or “translingual” (sometimes also featuring the suffix “-istic,” such as in the
“translinguistic sculpture”). This diversity testifies to the evolving state of the field and the great
variety of phenomena that it includes. Because my study touches on a range of linguistic practices
and conditions, I have chosen “multilingual” as an umbrella term. For my purposes, “bilingual”
appears too tied to the individual level and to the numerical notion of two languages.
3. With roughly six thousand languages spoken in about two hundred countries currently in
existence, it is obvious that language contact situations abound in the world, as linguist Li Wei notes
(“Dimensions of Bilingualism” 3). Wei adds that “one in three of the world's population routinely uses
two or more languages for work, family life, and leisure,” especially in “many countries in Africa and
Asia, [where] several languages co-exist and large sections of the population speak three or more
languages” (4, 7). Michael Clyne, another linguist, concludes that “there are probably more bilinguals
in the world than monolinguals” (“Multilingualism” 300). For documentations of multilingualism in
literary history, see Forster, The Poet's Tongues, and Kellman, The Translingual Imagination.
4. For references to the belated nature of monolingualism, see translation
scholar Lefevere, Translation; linguists Braunmüller and Ferraresi, Aspects of Multilingualism;
education scholar Hu, Schulischer Fremdsprachenunterricht; literary critics Feldman, Modernism and
Cultural Transfer; Forster, The Poet's Tongues; Kremnitz, Mehrsprachigkeit in der Literatur;
and Steiner, Extraterritorial.
5. On a “monolingual bias” in the fields of linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and psychology,
see Aneta Pavlenko (Emotions and Multilingualism). Mary Catherine Davidson likewise refers to a
“monolingual bias” in the study of medieval multilingualism (Medievalism, Multilingualism, and
Chaucer), while Ingrid Gogolin refers to a “monolingual habitus” built into the German educational
system (p. 215 ) (Der monolinguale Habitus). I use the term “paradigm” to indicate the way in which
presumptions of monolingualism thoroughly structure both modern modes of thinking and the
makeup of institutions.
6. Besides Gogolin, Der monolinguale Habitus, see Hu's remarkable case study, Schulischer
Fremdsprachenunterricht, for two examples from contemporary Germany.
7. On widespread linguistic diversity in France at the time of the revolution, see David A. Bell, who
notes that this multilingualism was not seen as an issue prior to 1790 (“Lingua Populi” 1409–10).
8. On the significance of language for the nation as imagined community, see the classic study
by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. His attention to print-capitalism indicates crucial
historical preconditions for the monolingual paradigm. At the same time, Anderson's own
assumptions about language(s) reveal that he, too, is caught up in this paradigm, falsely declaring,
for instance, that “the bulk of mankind is monoglot” throughout history (Imagined Communities 38).
9. To this end, the EU has formulated specific language policies, such as in its New Framework
Strategy for Multilingualism, although it has been slow to implement them. For a critical view of these
policies, see Gal, “Migration, Minorities, and Multilingualism.”
10. For an exemplary reading of mono- and multilingualism in transnational cinema, see David
Gramling's essay on Fatih Akin's films, “On the Other Side of Monolingualism.”
11. See, for example, Hoffman, Lost in Translation; Kaplan, French Lessons; Isabelle de
Courtivron's collection of bilingual writers reflecting on their languages, Lives in
Translation; Ogulnick's collection of testimonies from bilingual subjects speaking about their
everyday experiences, Language Crossings. On the language memoir as a genre,
see Kramsch, The Multilingual Subject, who productively draws on it for rethinking second-language
acquisition from a multilingual perspective, as well as Brian Lennon's more critical take in his
study In Babel's Shadow, where he points to the paradoxically monolingual form that most of these
narratives take under the influence of trade publishing industry pressures.
12. Besides Forster, The Poet's Tongues, and Kellman, The Trans-lingual Imagination,
see Sollors, Multilingual America; Sommer's attention to multilingualism across the humanities, law,
and education in her book Bilingual Aesthetics and her edited volume Bilingual Games; and
Seyhan's exploration of multilingualism in U.S. and German minority literature, Writing outside the
Nation. The edited volumes Multilinguale Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert (Manfred (p. 216 ) Schmeling
and Monika Schmitz-Emans) and Exophonie: Anders-Sprachigkeit (in) der Literatur (Susan Arndt et
al.) are two significant German-language contributions to this field, focusing on literature.
13. On the cultural dynamics of globalization, albeit without attention to language,
see Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
14. See, for instance, Kellman's list of what he calls “translingual” writers—meaning both those who
write works in more than one language and those who write primarily in a belatedly acquired
language—which usefully underscores the prevalence of multilingualism from antiquity to the
present, yet does not provide historicized distinctions (Translingual Imagination 117–18).
15. For instance, literary critics Johann Strutz and Peter V. Zima note how amazed the French poet
Mallarmé was that Englishman William Beckford wrote his 1782 novel Vathek in French; Mallarmé
could only imagine a “mystérieuse influence” behind this choice (cit. in Literarische Polyphonie 7).
This perspective—which Strutz and Zima share—presumes a vantage point where such writing is
considered rare and out of the ordinary—that is, a vantage point informed by the monolingual
paradigm. Beckford's writing, in contrast, belongs to a moment before the paradigm had become
dominant.
16. Pieter Judson's study of so-called language frontiers in Imperial Austria demonstrates powerfully
the persistence of multilingual practices and self-conceptions in early twentieth-century rural
Bohemia and the concerted effort required by monolingually minded nationalist activists to displace
these. Thus, even within Europe, the monolingual paradigm did not immediately take hold. In other
contexts, especially colonial and postcolonial ones, monolingualism and multilingualism played out
differently, in ways that require further study. For an illuminating contrast between multilingual
practices in India and monolingual conceptions in Europe, for example, see Indian Germanist Anil
Bhatti, “Mehrsprachigkeit und kulturelle Diversität.” Bhatti suggests that in environments where
multilingualism is the norm, other languages appear as merely “different,” whereas normatively
monolingual environments treat them as “foreign.”
17. See, for instance, my discussion of the workings of the monolingual paradigm in Japan
(chapter 3) and in Turkey (chapter 4). The latter is, of course, ambivalently situated at the margin of
Europe.
18 . A note on pronunciation: the Turkish letter ğ is a lengthening vowel and not a consonant.
Zaimoğlu is thus roughly pronounced as Zime-OH-lou.
19. This is not to say that pre-monolingual writing did not follow any rules, but rather that those rules
were not based on—anach (p. 217 ) ronistic—ethno-national identitarian categories. For an
elucidation of multilingualism in medieval Britain, see Davidson, Medievalism, Multilingualism,
Chaucer; for a discussion of language choice in early modern European literatures,
see Kremnitz, Mehrsprachigkeit in der Literatur.
20. See also literary critic Emily Apter, who demonstrates that this “linguistic nominalism” (that is,
the conjunction of language names with alleged characteristics) continues to be a crucial site in the
struggles over language today (Translation Zone 5).
21. In contrast to this view of languages as objects, Gal proposes rethinking language as linguistic
practice. Gal's field work in contemporary Eastern Europe demonstrates the impact of the dominant
conception by showing how some linguistic practices are made invisible or marginal in numerous
institutional frameworks, including the language policies of the European Union.
22. For an overview of Herder's thinking on language, see also Trabant, “Herder and Language.”
23. See also Niekerk, “The Romantics and Other Cultures,” on Herder's “theory of territoriality” that
accompanied his view of cultural pluralism and has had a substantial impact on later conceptions of
cultural difference.
24. The history of translation offers an important correlate to the study of multilingualism since the
field of translation, too, deals with the conjunction of multiple languages, though it emphasizes the
process of moving from one language to another, whereas multilingualism focuses on their forms of
simultaneous presence. For the standard introduction to the growing field of translation studies,
see Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies. For a short overview of the history of translation as well as
important contributions to the conceptualization of translation, see Rainer Schulte and John
Biguenet,Theories of Translation. However, Brian Lennon cautions against the impact of translation
studies on multilingualism, since a focus on translation obscures the fact that translations take the
place of the encounter with other languages and therefore in some sense lessen multilingualism (In
Babel's Shadow).
25. For the terms “universalist” and “relativist,” see, for example, George Steiner, After Babel.
26. See Steiner's discussion in After Babel (here 85).
27. See Cheah, Spectral Nationality, for an elaboration of the move from the mechanic to the
organic paradigms and its implications.
28. See also Anderson on the importance of the conception of “natural ties” and their “unchosen”
nature for the attachment to the (p. 218 ) nation (Imagined Communities 143). He suggests that it is
the notion that these ties are natural, and not chosen, that gives them a “halo of disinterestedness,”
thereby preparing patriotic passions.
29. Although Schleiermacher asserts that the question of writing in multiple languages cannot even
be raised, his own essay is haunted by this thought, as he returns to that possibility again and again,
in order to declare it impossible (see “Über die verschiedenen Methoden” 86–89). On this disavowal
of other languages and their insistent return as central to Schleiermacher's hermeneutics,
see Weidner, “Frevelhafter Doppelgänger.”
30. I discuss Wagner's statement and its specifically antisemitic context more fully in chapter 1. For
a range of other writers from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century who express similar
sentiments that writing in anything but one's mother tongue is impossible see Kellman, Translingual
Imagination (ix–x).
31. In the discourses at hand, “mother” operates abstractly, by merely alluding to the affective and
psychic complexity of mothers, motherhood, and mother-child relations, without allowing this
complexity to fully unfold and impact the discourse. In the following analyses, I therefore treat
“mother” in a relatively abstract way that does not account either for mothers in the social world, or
for motherhood as a complex experience and condition. See the volume edited by Garner et al., The
(M)other Tongue, for feminist psychoanalytic explorations reflecting on these issues.
32. For the following account I draw on Ahlzweig's history of the term in his book Muttersprache—
Vaterland.
33. For a summary of the historical scholarship on the changing affective quality of familial
relationships, see Gestrich, Geschichte der Familie, especially 5–6, 35, 38, 73, 106.
34. Mary Gossy's intriguing readings of gender and language in Freudian psychoanalysis develop
along this path; see Freudian Slips.
35. In his book Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler charts the material conditions for the
production of discourse. His attention to the “materialities of communication” leads him to posit
distinct discursive constellations for the periods he names in shorthand “1800” and “1900.” The turn
to phonetics is one of the characteristic changes in the “discourse network 1800.”
36. The section “Lesenlernen um 1800” (Learning to Read around 1800), in which Kittler lays out
this development, is situated in the chapter entitled “Der Muttermund.” By using a word that usually
refers to the cervix, though it literally means “the mother's mouth,” (p. 219 ) Kittler relates even more
strongly the image of the birth of language to the mother's body (Aufschreibesysteme, 37–68).
37. See Robert, Origins of the Novel, who considers the family romance as the very source of the
novel. I have learnt much about reading family romances from Biddy Martin. See her own stimulating
readings in Femininity Played Straight.
38. Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Simona Argentieri, and Jorge Canestri, The Babel of the
Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Analytic Dimension, 72. This jointly
written book constitutes a landmark study about multilingualism and psychoanalysis. As they show in
great detail, multilingualism has been integral to psychoanalysis from the beginning, both in its
history and institutional forms, and in its praxis. Freud treated many of his patients in multiple
languages or in a language that was not “native” to analyst and/or analysand. From Anna O. to the
Wolf Man, many of the cases themselves involved multilingual dimensions.
39. This characterization is Pavlenko's summary of the dominant view of multilingualism in
American psychoanalytic discourse in the later part of the twentieth century (Emotions and
Multilingualism 30). Claire Kramsch similarly argues against ignoring the “affective resonances in the
bodies of speakers and hearers,” including those in the foreign language classroom (The Multilingual
Subject 2).
40. See, for instance, its operation in the current German school system, as described
by Gogolin, Der monolinguale Habitus, or Hu, Schulischer Fremdsprachenunterricht, in their
respective studies.
41. See Sommer's extended discussion (Bilingual Aesthetics 157–75).
42. Forster's 1970 book The Poet's Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature was the first monograph
on literary multilingualism. A New Zealand comparatist with a specialization in the late Middle Ages
and the Early Modern period—that is, pre-monolingual periods—Forster compiled a wide range of
examples of multilingualism from antiquity to the twentieth century during his career, and published
individual articles on some of them, before he collected them in his book. At the time of publication,
his book was welcomed, yet it did not have a lasting impact on the study of literature in general or on
the specific study of literary multilingualism. Yet, because of its status as the only book-length
documentation of multilingualism as a significant, albeit widely varying phenomenon in literature, The
Poet's Tongues has been much more referenced in recent years. The fate of the book thus tells us
something about the development of the field.
43. This important work has been done both in monographs (Kellman, (p. 220 ) Translingual
Imagination; Seyhan, Writing), edited volumes (Sommer,Bilingual Games; Sollors, Multilingual
America; Arndt et al., Exophonie; Schmeling and Schmitz-Emans, Multilinguale Literatur), and in
collections gathering the reflections of authors on their multilingualism (Kellman, Switching
Languages; Courtivron, Lives in Translation).
44. In the “Germanic” context alone, see, for example, experimentation with Swedish (Lacatus, The
(In)Visibility Complex) and Dutch (Minnaard, New Germans, New Dutch).
45. Postcolonial studies of multilingualism offer important impulses for this book, such as Chantal
Zabus's work on West African literature in chapter 4(The African Palimpsest), yet it remains
important to mark differences between historical contexts and cultural constellations as well, as I
show in the course of that discussion. Although not specifically focused on language, the question
posed by Hito Steyerl and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez's edited volume Spricht die Subalterne
deutsch? (Does the Subaltern Speak German?) signals productive engagements with postcolonial
legacies in German studies.
46. See also Sommer's criticism of Derrida as not recognizing multilingual specificity and glossing
over it too much, as in his response to French-Algerian writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, the presumptive
addressee of his essay (Bilingual Aesthetics 42–45).
47. Specifically, Arendt is speaking about the importance of having a large archive of German
poems at the ready, when she suddenly cannot fully remember the expression “im Hinterkopf” and
instead says, in English, “in the back of my mind.” The slip is thus directly related to a mapping of the
location of languages and their position in the foreground or in the back, as superficially present or
deeply anchored. The published German version retains the English phrase, though it also
completes the German expression she only partially remembers (Gaus, “Hannah Arendt: Was
bleibt?” 24), while the English translation simply lists the English phrase without explanation (Arendt,
“What Remains?” 13). The particular passage of the interview is also available on the Internet
at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn3deYMRllk. An extended discussion of Arendt could show how
much her thinking about language is indebted to the monolingual paradigm, while her decades-long
bilingual writing practice—in German and English—contradicts her beliefs in concrete ways. In short,
she acts out the tensions of the postmonolingual condition in exemplary ways.
48. I specifically take issue with Lennon's reading of Özdamar (see chapter 5), since her use of
literal translation is inadequately captured by a focus on plurilingualism.
(p. 221 ) 49. For debates and anxieties around the German language in an age of globalization, see
the volume edited by Gardt and Hüppauf,Globalization and The Future of the German.
50. On Jewish literary multilingualism, see for instance Wirth-Nesher, Call It
English; Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer; Wittbrodt,Mehrsprachige jüdische Exilliteratur.
51. Michael Brenner's edited volume on Jewish languages in German contexts is a valuable
contribution to this direction (Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt).
52. Besides Adelson's pioneering conceptual work, see also Konuk's study of German-Jewish exiles
in Turkey, East West Mimesis.
53. Some authors, such as Doğan Akhanli and Kemal Yalçin, write in Turkish only, even as they live
in Germany (on these authors see Konuk, “Taking on German and Turkish History”). Others, such as
Aras Ören and Güney Dal, write in Turkish but do so in order to publish in German translation. Some
generally write in German, but occasionally also compose in Turkish, such as Zafer Şenocak, who
published his first Turkish-language novel, Köşk, in 2008. Yet others, such as Renan Demirkan and
Zaimoglu, write in German only. This brief sketch does not yet account for multilingual
practices withinthe texts. Chapter 4 and 5 discuss such practices and also demonstrate how varied
they are in form and in relation to the monolingual paradigm. For an extensive account of this
literature, albeit exclusively focusing on prose, see Cheesman, Novels of Turkish-German
Settlement. In his studyCosmopolitical Claims, Mani further expands the definition of “TurkishGerman”
by incorporating a chapter on Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk into his discussion. For the most
extensive conceptual reflection, with emphasis on works since the 1990s, see Adelson, The Turkish
Turn.
54. The labels have changed from “guest worker literature” in the 1970s to “foreigner's literature”
(Ausländerliteratur) and “migrants' literature” in the 1980s, to “literature of migration,” “minority
literature,” and “intercultural literature” in the 1990s, to “Turkish-German literature” and “German
literature of Turkish migration” (the latter coined by Adelson), to name some of the most prominent
designations. The terms have often overlapped and have been used in competing ways. On these
labels, see, for example, Adelson, (The Turkish Turn 23–24) and Mani (Cosmopolitical Claims 14–
15).
55. My formulation draws on Ruth Mandel, who speaks of “Turkish challenges to citizenship and
belonging in Germany.” Mandel is among a growing number of scholars in the field exploring
versions of “cosmopolitanism” as an alternative framework for approaching the Turkish-German (p.
222 ) context. See also Cheesman, Novels of Turkish German Settlement and Mani, Cosmopolitical
Claims. Because of its primary emphasis on the functioning of the monolingual paradigm the present
study does not pursue this framework, although given the close association of cosmopolitanism with
multilingualism such a pursuit may be productive.
56. The “Turkish turn” has also had unforeseen multilingual effects for German studies: it has made
Turkish a desirable research language and has led a number of (U.S.-based) German studies
scholars to expand their linguistic repertoire by learning the language, thus multilingualizing the field
itself in novel ways.
57. See moment-art.com/moment/wordsearch/e/son.htm.
58. See Freud, “Fetishism.”
59. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. I have retained Sander's gendered
language in this passage.
60. Several assistants did the actual work of collecting words around New York City.
See Lamprecht, “How many living languages.”
61. On Frankfurt, see Römhild, “Global Heimat Germany.”
62. For perspectives on “Americanization” discourse in the twentieth century, see Mueller, German
Pop Culture.
63. For his theory of heteroglossia, see Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” on whose dynamic and
socially imbricated notion of language this book draws.
64. In keeping with the book's focus on particular practices rather than multilingual identities more
generally, this definition of “bilingual writing” therefore excludes authors such as Joseph Conrad or
Assia Djebar who are fluent in multiple languages but only write in one, even if it is considered a
“nonnative” language.