Interreligious Dialogue in Contemporary German Fiction: Feridun Zaimoglu and Navid Kermani

In Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin, Katherine Ewing discusses the German media reception of so-called honor killings among Muslim immigrants in Berlin. At the heart of her analysis is the argument that the stigmatization of Turkish, and by extension Islamic, masculinity functions as a cultural scapegoat of German nation-building. While we live in an ever more connected world, in which mobility and migration have shaped the social experience of individuals across national boundaries, this resurgence of right-wing nationalism is a problem which societies across the globe need to confront jointly. In this presentation, I turn to two writers of contemporary German literature, both of which are also important public intellectuals: Feridun Zaimoglu and Navid Kermani. More specifically I turn to a somewhat unlikely element of their writing, interreligious dialogue. At a time when the vilification of Islamic beliefs seems at the forefront of right-wing movements across Europe and the U.S., contemporary German authors like Zaimoglu and Kermani, both explicitly and implicitly, have turned to religion to show how Christian and Islamic traditions are very much intertwined if we look at them as traditions of beliefs, as well as traditions of stories and shared aesthetics. Through close readings of selected texts, both fictional and non-fictional, by Kermani and Zaimoglu, I argue that transnational formations of mobility and migration can be much better understood in their complexity if we attend to the intersections of Islamic and Christian traditions, as well as their respective intersections with literary and aesthetic formations.