Guide for teaching Aras Ören’s Was Will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse? using Yasemin Yildiz’s excerpted translation What does Niyazi want in Naunyn Street?
Aras Ören’s Was Will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse? With Yasemin Yildiz’s excerpted translation What does Niyazi want in Naunyn Street?
Introduction
A book-length epic poem, What does Niyazi want in Naunyn Street? (1973) was the first Turkish German literary work to reach a broad public audience. It raised awareness among a progressive leftist German readership about Turkish Germans as both a new resident population, while placing emphasis on Turkish Germans as individuals, rather than as a homogenous group.
Preparation
Students should read Yildiz’s partial translation of What does Niyazi want in Naunyn Street? available on JStor.
Text and Discussion
Niyazi explores questions of migration and transnationalism from the perspective of the hyper- local (Naunynstrasse). I usually begin class discussion by asking students to look for references to the street in this poem. Here we discuss the story’s setting in Kreuzberg and note the poem’s preoccupation with questions of settlement.
- Kreuzberg is a working-class West Berlin neighborhood.
- It was one of the only places Turkish guest workers could find landlords willing to rent out apartments to them and has had a historically large Turkish population.
I then ask students to read the opening section of Niyazi (“Beginning” on 663) out loud and ask how characters are linked in this poem.
- Old and new Kreuzberg residents are linked by their comings and goings on the street.
- Note how the poem departs Ali when he leaves the street and shifts to Frau Kutzer
- Without leaving Naunynstrasse, the poem links these characters through reference to colors (Bluefish in the bay of Bebek and Frau Kutzer’s feet, which are blue from cold)
- Naunynstrasse is also linked to other places in Berlin, such as the famous Café Bauer and the Borsig plant in Berlin, and the neighborhood of Bebek in Istanbul, Turkey.
Group work: Ask students to read the following sections about loud to each other in groups and discuss the following questions:
- What is the significance of narrative shifts and changes in perspective in Ören’s writing?
- What kinds of links does Niyazi establish between characters?
- What is the significance of labor for all characters, for example?
- How does the migration history of Frau Kutzer’s family (who came from Eastern Prussia) help to unsettle the binary between natives and migrants?
Group 1: “A Thing Like a Nightmare” (664-665)
Group 2: “Frau Kutzer’s Dream” (665-666)
Group 3: “Frau Kutzer’s Neighbors” (666-667)
Group 4: “Niyazi Gümüşkılıç” (667-669)
Group 5: “Halime’s Unruly Children” (669)
Discuss “Five Turks – A Corner Shop” as a class.
- How does this section broach stereotypes?
- What is the significance of the “exchanges” between Frau Kutzer and Halime, as well as between Mehmet and Frau Meyer?
- What is the significance of the said and unsaid, direct speech and internal thought?
- Why is it important for the overall structure of the poem that we view characters through the perspective of other characters?
Conclude with a discussion of the final section and the introduction of broken German (rendered here into English) in the poem.
- How does this poem broach questions of (self)representation?
- Recall that Ören was a political exile from Turkey; this poem was written in Turkish and translated into German.
- How does the final section contrast labor with humanity?
Developed by Kristin Dickinson