Cihan Acar
No Katie in Heilbronx

A young man of Turkish origin from Heilbronn tries to make a football career in Turkey but fails. He then returns home without knowing how he will go on. And the city is seething.

By Holger Moos

© Hanser Berlin Venue: The mere fact that Cihan Acar’s debut novel Hawaii is not set in Berlin, Hamburg or Frankfurt deserves respect and attracts attention. With the exception of Kleist’s play Katie of Heilbronn, the city is certainly not at the centre of Germany’s literary map. We learn that it also has a problem district, the Hawaii of the title, where a large proportion of Heilbronn’s Turkish diaspora lives. The story takes place over a few scorching-hot summer days – a formal nod to Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, which also covers only a few days and is one of the books that Acar claims inspired him.
 
Player: The protagonist of Acar’s novel is 21-year-old Kemal Arslan. Kemal was a talented footballer who managed to reach the first Turkish division as a professional player. An automobile accident not only totalled his Jaguar but also crushed his left foot. Now he’s returned to his hometown of Heilbronn – without any idea what to do with his life.
 
The first period of play: Something is brewing in the pent-up heat. Right at the start, in an establishment called “Beer Hell,” Kemal is informed that he, a “Turk,” should get lost. The right-wing extremist HWA (“Heilbronn, Wake Up”) movement is forming in the city. There is an immigrant countermovement called the “Kankas” (“mates”). Pressure is building in the city. Kemal doesn’t really belong to any group so he begins roving the streets, ruminating over his glorious football past and the bleak and hopeless present.
 
The second period of play: The pressure finally erupts in real street battles; Heilbronn is burning. From his balcony, Kemal watches as hordes of black-clad men wearing sunglasses march into his neighbourhood. They chant “Heil-bronn wake up!” and “A dead foreigner for every dead German!” When he happens to meet one of the kankas on the street, Kemal joins them, but when the kankas tear apart a traitor’s kebab shop, it’s too much for Kemal and he runs away. After a few detours he runs straight into the arms of the neo-Nazis, who’ve put up a roadblock at the entrance to his neighbourhood.
 
Added time: A failure in his football career and in love, in the end Kemal at least realises, “I knew exactly where I wanted to go. To a place where I can be who I am. Not Kemal, the footballer, not Kemal, the unemployed bloke, the drifter, the loser, the traitor, the salesman, the man in the middle. Just me. I have to find that place.”
 
Tackle: The right-wing extremist HWA movement and the Kankas are waging a kind of proxy war. Supporters are drummed up from all over Germany and Heilbronn becomes the boiling point of the potential for racially motivated violence found everywhere. The militant Kankas, headed by a leader named Abdullah, also organises the national resistance. “Our brothers from other cities are at the ready ... We have waited far too long! ... We are striking back! We’ll tear the city out of their dirty hands!”
 
Multiple injuries: Kemal’s professional career in Turkey not only cost him his left foot, but also his girlfriend Sina. When he returns to Heilbronn, he wants to win back Sina, who comes from a wealthy family that owns a luxurious mansion above the city. But nothing comes of it. Compared to the rest of the plot, the love story is rather weak; Sina’s character remains quite vague and she and her milieu mainly serve to represent a rich, white counter-world.
 
Scene: A love scene, or at least a friendship scene, between man and machine. The notoriously close relationship between successful footballers and their luxury cars is tenderly depicted here. Kemal parked his disabled Jag in a car park and converses with his battered status symbol, which pleads to be repaired and wants only to be driven by Kemal. In the end, the Jaguar states in disappointment, “My grandfather was right. There’s no relying on you humans.”
 
Result: This novel could be a portent for this year’s unrest in the city of Stuttgart or the racist murders in Hanau and was certainly also influenced by the 2018 xenophobic riots in Chemnitz. At any rate, civil-war-like conditions in a provincial German town have so far been a rare subject of contemporary literature. According to Christoph Schröder from the SZ, Acar has “succeeded in taking a coherent snapshot of Germany.” Hawaii was awarded the Literature Prize of the Doppelfeld Foundation. The jury lauded the “Rapid-fire dialogues, sensitive character depictions and a fine sense for Swabian and Turkish-German vernacular ... in Cihan Acar’s debut. Everyday racism and discrimination are the highly topical issues that Acar presents both parenthetically and strikingly.”