Hybrid identity in Germany doubles rather than relieves exclusion

Evidence

At the close of the twentieth century it is the turn of the Turks. Can Turks, even hybrids like the narrator, really become Germans? According to Heinrich, “The Germans have learned nothing from history … now they have brought the Turks here. And they never came to terms even with the Jews” (82). Physical assimilation through surgery or intermarriage seems to be no prophylaxis in Senocak’s world. Hybridity, such as that of the protagonist, means only that one is exposed to a double risk. One is at the end an oriental, no matter what one’s identity or language. Being hybrid only reinforces this. The protagonist desires not to be cosmopolitan, just “simply” German. Yet this definition is denied to him by his Turkish identity; and, in his own estimation, his Jewish ancestry reinforces the denial. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 780

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the doubled alienation of Chang-rae Lee (Korean-American) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, where hybridity denies rather than grants belonging. — connects to: the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘assimilation as no prophylaxis’ — how physical/verbal passing fails to secure belonging across two different minority waves in the same country.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from ‘Jews as the oriental’ to ‘Turks as the new Jews’ with hybridity as double risk rather than bridge is a genuinely paradigm-shifting frame for thinking about ethnic succession in national contexts.