Gastarbeiterulcus and Realism in Güney Dal: A Gastrointestinal Account of “Gastarbeiterliteratur”

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between Turkish German literature and medicine by focusing on Güney Dal’s İş Sürgünleri (1976; published in German translation as Wenn Ali die Glocken läuten hört, 1979). In his first novel, Dal documents the 1973 Ford strikes in Cologne in a style reminiscent of social realism. What sets Dal’s writing apart, however, is the inclusion of the story of a guest worker, Kadir, whose breasts grow due to the hormones given to him by the doctor at the factory to treat his peptic ulcer, a common problem among labour migrants in the 1960s and 1970s that was referred to as “ Gastarbeiterulcus.” Due to the language barrier between doctors and newly arrived guest workers, misdiagnosis of the condition was prevalent in the early 1970s. At the time Dal was writing his novel, debates revolved around the psychosomatic causes of the illness, which was interpreted as an “Entwurzelungsreaktion” by many experts. With the “paradigm shift” after the discovery of Helicobacter pylori by Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren in 1983 and the standardization of antibacterial treatment in the late 1980s, this theoretical framework to explain the ailment was partially abandoned. The medical debate of the time constitutes the actual kernel of Dal’s novel, despite the fact that the novel seemingly centres on the strike. In addition to unsettling the discourses that medicalize the labour migrant’s body during the Anwerbestopp period, Dal’s scrupulous attention to and modernist depiction of the illness, the impossibility of communication between patients and doctors, and Kadir’s subsequent psychological breakdown undermine the novel’s social realism from within and pave the way for the author’s later experimental works in which psychosis and miscommunication play a central role.