25 September 2009

The scene in Germany

Klaus Hübner gave an account of what was happening in Germany in the area of multilingual literature three years ago in an article entitled "He Alder, hassu Ei-Pott bei?” (2006; translated into English by Jonathan Uhlaner):

"Younger authors like Yadé Kara (Selam Berlin, 2003) have definitively achieved for ‘Kanakisch,’ which is often used with parodic intention (as, for instance, in Süleyman and Sauter in the book Hürriyet Love Express by Imran Ayata, 2005), the status of literature. Artists like Wladimir Kaminer (Russendisko, i.e., Russians’ Disco, 2000) have done something similar for ‘German-Russian,’ which emerged after 1990 in train of the increasing immigration of Russians of German origin and is sometimes also called ‘Quelia’ and written in a mixed Latin-Cyrillic alphabet. Altogether, the extremely heterogeneous immigrant literature in German is a rich source of examples for contemporary ‘mixed languages.’"

It is not only countries that may be called melting pots, but literary texts themselves.

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