Open Access

Raymond Graeme Dunphy

• Recent critical discussions of German migrant and post-migrant literature has repeatedly focussed on the phenomenon of the exotic: where some writers seem consciously to exoticise their writing, exaggerating myths about Oriental culture and thus highlighting differences between East and West, perhaps with the aim of making foreigners exciting, likeable or deserving of sympathy, others react against this, rejecting clichés and highlighting continuities, apparently with the aim of making cultural boundaries traversable. Both are understandable strategies tor dealing with displacement. ln this context l should like to adopt a term from quite a different discipline. Bultmanns concept of demythologising. ln theology, demythologising means dissectting the "myth" - the sacred but implausible narrative - to distil from it a kerygmatic truth. If we regard the exotic as being, in this technical sense, the "myth", then it is not entirely devoid of a relationship to reality, but it cannot simply be read as "teal". Thus demythologising is the opposite process to exoticising. Drawing on satirical texts by four Turkish-German writers and cabaretts, this paper looks at ways in which this ethnic minority can use ironic self-depiction to capture and defuse the stereotypes with which it is confronted. Under the rubric "cold turkey", that is, Turkishness without the psychedelics, it shows how the satirists transpose clichés into everyday situations, where they become absurd. The paper’s conclusion is likely to be that hybrid communities are inevitably torn between a desire to highlight demarcation lines (exoticism) and a need to accentuate the potential for assimilation (demythologising). Humour, which in any case has a tendency either to underline or to debunk stereotypes, serves as a highly effective tool for working out this dichotomy, and as all four satirists have successfully reached main-stream German audiences, it would also appear to be a key mechanism in achieving intet-cultural understanding.