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The introduction provides the historical and conceptual backdrop to the argument that monolingualism is a more recent phenomenon than multilingualism and elaborates on the notion of the “postmonolingual condition.” It charts the emergence of the monolingual paradigm in late-eighteenth-century Europe, with emphasis on the conceptual impact of the thought of Herder and Schleiermacher. The chapter also provides a brief history of the term “mother tongue” and discusses feminist, media theoretical, and psychoanalytic perspectives on this concept before offering a new reading of it as a “linguistic family romance.” It situates the present study in relationship to literary and linguistic scholarship on multilingualism, as well as in relationship to German, German-Jewish, and Turkish-German Studies. Through an analysis of the conceptual artwork Wordsearch: A Translinguistic Sculpture by artist Karin Sander, the chapter argues for the importance of a critical approach to multilingualism that takes the monolingual paradigm into account, even in an age of globalization and transnational flows.

This chapter discusses the practice of translating the expressions of one language literally into another as a particular mode of multilingual writing. Identifying the specificity of this mode, in which another language is simultaneously present and absent, as well as its prevalence in postcolonial writing, it turns to Turkish-German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar's stories and novels from the 1990s, in which literally translated Turkish expressions feature frequently. Reading literal translation in relationship to the literality of the traumatic flashback as elaborated by trauma theorist Cathy Caruth, the chapter shows that these multilingual instances do not so much express the experience of migration from Turkey to Germany, as is so often presumed, but rather refer back to the experience of state violence perpetrated in the “mother tongue” prior to migration. A discussion of the linguistic history of the Ottoman Empire and the radical language reform in the Turkish Republic underscores the role of state intervention in the construction of the mother tongue. Özdamar's practice of literal translation, it is finally argued, also reconfigures German as a post-Holocaust language.

This chapter discusses code-switching and mixing of languages as the most contested linguistic practice in the age of globalization. It demonstrates how this practice, particularly associated with immigrant youth, is racialized by public discourse, but can also serve to thematize such racialization when employed critically. Feridun Zaimoglu's provocative 1995 bestseller Kanak Sprak, a collection of stylized monologues attributed to young Turkish-German men “on society's edge”—from pimp, garbage collector, and transsexual to Islamist—exemplifies such a mobilization of multilingual youth language. Yet, as the chapter shows, Zaimoglu's literary language does not follow sociolinguistic models but rather mixes codes drawn from such diverse sources as Northern German dialect, biblical language, hip-hop English, and Germanized Yiddish. This particular mix, it is argued, is closely connected to articulating an abjected but defiant racialized masculinity. Throughout, the chapter situates the style and impetus of Kanak Sprak in relationship to comparable Anglophone writing, which has been referred to as literature in “Rotten English” (Dohra Ahmad). A coda focuses on the ambivalent legacy of Kanak Sprak in media discourses and comedy routines.

The Conclusion summarizes the book’s import in historical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical terms, draws the methodological consequences, and sketches briefly how the Orientalist traditions persist in displaced ways in contemporary Germany (especially with relation to Turkish-German and Jewish-German hyphenated identities).