Information »Silence at 39 Degrees«

The story »Silence at 39 Degrees« by Dilek Güngör picks up on one of the extreme heat
waves that have happened in Germany in the last few years and explores the possible
connections between human beings and climate through the microcosm of the family.
Heat connects the spaces of the story like a set of brackets: a garden in Germany and a
place in Turkey, where the father of the narrator grew up. Whether the heat reminds her
father of Turkey, whether he even needs the heat in order to feel good, whether he misses
closeness and warmth, his daughter wants to know all these things about him; yet she
cannot manage to articulate the questions. The silence between them persists, indeed, it
seems almost to vibrate in the heat. And yet perhaps it is not a bitter silence, but rather
a helpless, searching one. “We said nothing and kept on loving each other wordlessly”,
writes the narrator.
Questions about closeness and foreignness are linked with the heat in the story. Can it
bring the place the father grew up in, the place he left long ago, any closer? Can it give
the daughter an opening to find out about her father’s past? And can the heat maybe even
change people, like the narrator thought as a child: that people in a cold country like Germany
are cold people too and the other way round?
Their neighbour interrupts the afternoon peace of the garden with his loud complaints.
“You people can take this heat. It almost kills us people.” You people and us people – as
though the heat perceived as unfamiliar only deepens the imagined divide between the
foreign and the familiar, which still haunts the neighbour’s mind sixty years after the
arrival of the first ›Gastarbeiter‹ (›guest workers‹) from Turkey. The neighbour thus locates
himself within the tradition of ‘climatology’, a culturally chauvinist idea around since
antiquity that attempts to originate a determination of cultures in climate and constructs
cultures located in temperate zones as superior (Hamel 2017, 421). Each of the authors
locate themselves in the climatic centre and seek to interpret their own geographical
position as evidence of cultural superiority (Hamel 2017, 421). ›Climatology« was therefore
a central part of the Eurocentric discourse of power. This doctrine was rejected in
part by Johann Gottfried Herder in favour of a mutual influence between human beings
and the climate and a concept of cultural diversity (Hamel 2017, 422 and Hamel 2016, 87).