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Author Aydemir: "I'm just the voice in your head"
Photo: Sibylle Fendt / Ostkreuz / Hanser
Rhine town.
You don't need more than this name, and all the standards of a small German town pop up in your head: A pedestrian zone that's so big that there's enough space for an ice cream parlor and a savings bank, but not for an H&M.
The interchangeability of the terraced houses in the residential areas.
Where there is everything you need, but it doesn't feel like anything is going on.
Rheinstadt doesn't exist, even if the name sounds as if you couldn't make it up.
The Yılmaz family, about whom Fatma Aydemir's new novel Djinns is based, lives in Rheinstadt.
Father Hüseyin came from a Turkish mountain village because Germany needed workers and he needed security and money for himself and his family.
Now it's the beginning of the 1990s and time has ensured that the four children in the Yılmaz family don't exactly like Germany, but Germany is their home, for better or worse.
While with the parents it is clearer that they never got there.
The unsaid breaks open
There is Hüseyin, who after decades of shift work is taking early retirement in order to afford the luxury of an apartment in Istanbul.
While he was working for the children's future, his wife Emine functioned but carried with her a great deal of sadness.
There is the eldest daughter Sevda, she lives with the fact that her house was once attacked by racists and has consistently worked her way up to restaurant owner.
Hakan, a nice, semi-criminal guy who manages somehow.
Peri, who is the first in the family to study.
And Ümit, the youngest, who falls in love with a friend at soccer practice.
And there are lots of emotional secrets.
Things you didn't say to each other because they would distance you from the other.
Or have you already moved away?
Because you've struggled with your father's expectations for far too long.
Because you're jealous of your own daughter.
Because you can't get out of your own skin and it makes a difference if you're a student reading Judith Butler in her varsity women's group or a mom who has depression but can't deal with it because she doesn't understand the concept of depression knows.
When Hüseyin suddenly dies, everything that has not been said in the Yılmaz family breaks open, devours itself in the course of the novel and develops the pull that makes very good light literature and that ensures that »Djinns« can hardly be put down.
Fatma Aydemir published her debut novel »Ellbogen« five years ago. At that time she told about a young German-Turkish woman and her anger and established herself as one of the most important voices of a generation of new-left and migration-driven authors.
»Djinns« is an almost epic family novel.
Children and wife rush to Istanbul to attend Hüseyin's funeral.
They all meet in Turkey and at first they don't seem to have much more in common than their disgust at the new apartment, with which Hüseyin tried to bring his own story to a happy ending: "Four rooms, suffering from exhaustion and Remember death and nothing else."
The book is not a reckoning
In each chapter, Aydemir explains from the perspective of a family member why the happy ending isn't possible: Daughter Peri, who is studying in Frankfurt, realizes that she hasn't thought about her father for years.
The eldest Sevda hasn't had any contact with her parents for a long time because they abandoned her when she wanted to leave her husband.
And Ümit would never talk to his mother about his feelings for boys.
There is justice in Aydemir's storytelling, everyone gets space, is seen;
only with the secondary characters does she draw something flat.
Some critics also complained that the image of Germany that Aydemir draws is based on clichés and is too free of contradictions and too smooth and gloomy.
Yes, the experience with the country and its homophobic or racist inhabitants, which is almost always portrayed as bad, plays a role. Aydemir certainly set her plot at the beginning of the 1990s, at the dark time after the reunification of the racist arson attacks.
But actually she doesn't take this Germany that seriously, it's not the protagonist.
The book is therefore not a reckoning.
Aydemir puts her focus - and thus also the area where contradictions become important and interesting - on her characters, who only now that a loved one has died realize that they have been on their own for a long time.
Djinns is not a non-political novel, and the migration experience plays a big role in everyone.
But it's more a book about grief and the paths it takes in this peculiar web of family.
This is most evident in a scene in which the mother Emine speaks to her eldest daughter Sevda, after years of silence between the two.
As a reader, it grabs you how the two women go in circles, unable to step out of their own situation - actually they could be alike, only 16 years are between them, but Emine's story is so sad that she never married her daughter really well and Sevda is unable to forgive her for that.
Aydemir describes the situation from Emine's perspective, but here – in contrast to the chapters that describe the living environment of the children's generation – she chooses to speak directly: “I'm just the voice in your head, Emine.
I'm nothing without you.
So tell me who are you?"
It's a smart move.
Emine is the way she is because she wasn't allowed to take responsibility for her life at first and then later couldn't anymore.
The voice relieves her of this burden.
"You can find the front door without any light, you know the way, this is your home, Emine." There is great caring in this you and an ending that is by no means good, but not all bad either.