"Dschinns" is the name of Fatma Aydemir's new novel: Five years ago, the Berlin journalist wrote her debut "Ellbogen", a book that was central to the ever-growing German-language literature about migrant worlds of experience in today's Federal Republic.

In 2019, Aydemir then published an anthology that brought together many of the associated literary voices, Deniz Utlu, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Mithu Sanyal.

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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"Your homeland is our nightmare" had a title like ice cold water in your face or like a t-shirt logo.

A title that at the same time summed up the connecting experience in the life of the many different minorities with the majority residents of the Federal Republic: The place and place are the same, but the perspective is different.

"For us" was the dedication of this anthology, which Aydemir had edited together with Hengameh Yaghoobifarah ("Ministry of Dreams"), and this "us" was almost more concise than the title of the book.

Because it also marked a "you".

And with it the unresolved conflict of the so-called Federal Republic's integration policy: as long as you don't realize that we see it differently because we can't look at this country the way you do, because you see us differently, it will be difficult for you and us.

It's complicated because "we" and "you" are never homogeneous.

But it is also a case for literature, which can make different perspectives and their coarsening and blurring perceptible, same place, same place, different view of things.

And there, where Fatma Aydemir in "Ellbogen" still told the story of a seventeen-year-old with the voice of young Hazal, who is looking for her place in her family, her neighborhood, her Berlin, her Istanbul, her life, "Dschinns" describes now the Yilmaz family, but with six votes: that of the father, the mother and those of the four children.

Djinns is a classic family novel in terms of the dynamics between parents and children, between parents and between children.

Classic in the sense that one recognizes leitmotifs not only from real life, but also from life that has often been told, because they are anthropological constants: the eldest son should take the place of the father, but doesn't want to, since he is under the role of the father has always suffered.

The eldest daughter fights for her mother's respect and that love and respect don't have to be the same.

But the earth also shakes under the Yilmaz family, a family like so many who came to Germany sixty years ago, which has no home, only transit between fixed addresses, which still do not provide stability: the parents, Hüseyin and Emine, emigrate from their Turkish mountain village to Germany in 1979.

They leave their eldest daughter Sevda with her grandparents, only take the younger children Hakan and Peri with them, and only bring Sevda two years later.

After Rheinstadt, that's what Fatma Aydemir, who was born in Karlsruhe in 1986, calls the ideal West German city.

Here Hüseyin works in the factory, here Emine gives birth to another son, Ümit.