Narrative Ethics in Contemporary German Minority Writing: Abbas Khider, Sherko Fatah, Rafik Schami

This study examines three narratives by contemporary minority writers who write in the German language: Die Orangen des Präsidenten (2011) by Abbas Khider, Im Grenzland (2001) by Sherko Fatah, and Die Sehnsucht der Schwalbe (2002) by Rafik Schami. By analyzing these texts through a framework of narrative ethics that relies on the work of narratologists such as Wayne Booth, James Phelan, Seymour Chatman, and Monika Fludernik, this study seeks to understand readers’ possible ethical responses. The framework of narrative ethics sheds light on how these texts function to prompt a reader’s open-ended exploration of ethical issues. This study is a first of its kind, not for its methodology, which has long existed in the realm of canonical literatures, but for the intersection of methodology and subject matter. It seeks to show that narrative ethics has a role — perhaps a particularly fertile one — when used to explore German language texts written by writers from migrant backgrounds. In the field of minority and migrant German literature, it aims to refocus attention on the reader’s experience with texts by exploring whether such texts achieve the often-stated goal (which was advanced by early promoters of migrant literature in the 1980s and is still prevalent in the marketing of this literature today) of allowing readers to explore Otherness.