ABSTRACT
We translated Sabahattin Ali’s novel The Madonna in the Fur Coat (1943) in 2011-13, after much encouragement and interest from colleagues had convinced us this project was long overdue.1 Over the previous decade, scholars of German-Turkish literature-eager to look beyond the “German national archive,” and thus also historically prior to West Germany’s first guest worker recruitment agreement with the Republic of Turkey in 1961-had been seeking new ways to share the work of writers, philosophers, and filmmakers on the German-Turkish axis whose Turkish-language works had remained untranslated and uncommented among German critics (Dickinson 2015, Göktürk 2014, Cheesman 2007, Mani 2007, Konuk 2010, Seyhan 2008, Gramling 2014). Despite the boom in Turkish-German studies throughout the 1990s, writers on the Turkish side of that linguistic relation-like Aras Ören, Güney Dal, Bilge Karasu, and indeed Sabahattin Ali-have hovered beyond the disciplinary frame of German Studies, while migrants and postmigrants writing in German are fêted as the epitome of that field: whether as exemplars of cultural integration for center-right-leaning critics or of cosmopolitan complexity for center-leftleaning critics. Against this complex literary-historical backdrop, fraught with literary monolingualism and selective multiculturalism, Madonna’s frame narrator’s opening remarks resonate in an extraordinarily contemporary way: “It is of course easier to find a hero who will jump down a well with a dragon at the bottom than to find someone who’ll dare to climb into a well when we have no idea what’s down there. In my case, it was thanks to luck alone that I got to know Sir Raif a little” (Ali 2013, 1).
