Selam Berlin

Selam Berlin (Eng. Greetings, Berlin ) is the debut novel by the Turkish author Yadé Kara , published in 2003 by Diogenes Verlag , which was awarded the German Book Prize in 2004.

content

The life of the nineteen-year-old Turk Hasan Kazan is just as changing as the city in which he spent his childhood - Berlin . After years of commuting with his family between Istanbul and Berlin, Hasan turned his back on Istanbul on the day of the fall of the Wall and went back to Berlin. He had previously passed his Abitur at a German school in Istanbul. But for him, Berlin is his true home. Right from the start, however, he was looking for an apartment, for work, for a great, honest love and for himself in Berlin. Hasan describes his experiences immediately after the opening of the wall: his feelings, the drastic changes and effects that German reunification brings with it, and how he and his family are coping with the changed situation. The family lives in Berlin-Kreuzberg , where Hasan's father and his uncle Halim have been running a small travel agency for several years. On the side, however, the head of the family has a secret relationship with an East German woman who suddenly appears in the West after the fall of the Wall and destroys family life. Hasan leads a casual life and drifts through the city. Sometimes he has a girl here, sometimes there. At first he would like to study archeology , but he quickly finds himself in the 'cool' scene of filmmakers and would-be stars.

Required reading

The first book by Yadé Karas, which was awarded the German Book Prize , was compulsory reading in Lower Saxony in 2010/2011 in the tenth grade of integrated comprehensive schools , which some educators have concerns about, for example because of youth language and scene jargon.

literature

expenditure

• Selam Berlin [Roman], Diogenes, Zurich 2003, ISBN 978-3-257-06335-6 , as Diogenes paperback 23391, Zurich 2001, ISBN 978-3-257-23391-9 .
  • Turkish: Selam Berlin (translated by Nafer Ermiş); İnkılâp, Istanbul 2004, ISBN 975-10-2249-5

Secondary literature

• Nico Elste: "Man, honor, weapon - Hesse, Hitler, Holocaust". The disillusionment of cultural idealisms in Yadé Kara's "Selam Berlin". In: Orth / Lüdeker (ed.): Post -Wende-Narrationen. The reunified Germany as reflected in literature and film . V&R Unipress, Göttingen 2010. ISBN 978-3-89971-655-9 . Pp. 73-83
• Petra Fachinger: Yadé Kara's "Selam Berlin". In: Stuart Taberner (Ed.): The novel in German since 1990 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2011. ISBN 0-521-19237-4 . Pp. 241-251
• Laura Peters: City Text and Self-Image. Berlin authors of post-migration after 1989 . Winter, Heidelberg 2012. ISBN 978-3-8253-6004-7 . Pp. 104-114
• Dalia Aboul Fotouh Salama: The literary representation of a German-Turkish experience of the fall of the Berlin Wall based on Yadé Kara's novel "Selam Berlin". In: Ernest WB Lüttich (Hrsg.): Metropolis as a place of encounter and isolation. Intercultural perspectives on urban space as a subject in literature and film . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2011. ISBN 978-3-631-61146-3 . Pp. 239-256

Web links

• Review at Deutschlandfunk

Individual evidence

1. ^ Association chairman of the German Association of Philologists Heinz-Peter Meidinger: "I would not prescribe the book as compulsory subject matter due to certain passages." Ems-Zeitung of August 16, 2010
2. ^ German lesson 2010 . What students have to read today and what teachers should convey  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. New Osnabrück newspaper from August 16, 2010