Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the 1990s

Some would call it the telos of postwar German history. 1990 marked the national unification of German territories and communities that had been divided by the victorious Allied Powers of World War II and by the political dictates of the Cold War that followed. Erected in August 1961, the Berlin Wall could be seen as a belated manifestation of the metaphorical Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill famously coined as a historical referent in 1945. When the Wall fell no less famously in 1989, the concrete holes chiseled out of it paved the way to a unified free Germany, which the West German state had explicitly claimed in its constitutional preamble as both its provisional reason for being and its ultimate reason not to be. But this Germany was not one free of the drag of historical narrative. One may readily interject that there are many problems with the teleological privilege and substantive interpretation that this encapsulated narrative implies. Unification itself has fueled heated debates about the many "competing narratives" of twentieth-century German history, the legitimacy with which they apportion guilt and adjudicate truth, and the representational modes on which they rely to render various pasts, contested presents, and possible futures intelligible to us. These opening remarks are themselves riddled with the pitfalls of implied logic, metaphorical reference, rhetorical belatedness, and representational omission. At issue here is less the summary or substance of those "competing narratives" already