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The Turkish-German axis is not the first route that comes to mind when rethinking German cinema in a global perspective. Turks in German cinema have tended to be cast in one-dimensional roles, as victims on the margins of society, unable to communicate and integrate. After more than four decades of Turkish presence in Germany, can we finally observe a new trend in representation, focusing more on playful enactments, mutual mirroring, and border-crossings? In an era of increasing global mobility of people and media, questions about the status of transnational cultural productions by travelers, emigrants, and exiles have achieved a new intensity. Film critics, concomitantly, have begun to call for a new genre category, one which explodes the boundaries of “original” national cultures as well as those of cinematic conventions. This new genre is variously labeled “independent transnational cinema,” (Naficy, 1996) “postcolonial hybrid films” (Shohat and Stam, 1994) or simply “world cinema,” (Roberts, 1998) a descriptor which, in contrast to older separatist categories such as “third world cinema” (Pines and Willemen, 1989) or “sub-state cinema” (Crofts, 1998), stresses the universality of mobility and diversity.

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In his essay titled “Drawing Blood” for Harper's magazine in June 2006, written as a response to the Muhammad cartoon affair, Art Spiegelman argued convincingly that a cartoon is, first and foremost, a cartoon. It sounds straightforward, but is it really? Following Spiegelman, we can define caricatures as charged or loaded images that compress ideas into memorable icons, namely clichés. A cartoon must have a point, and a good cartoon can change our perspective on the ruling order. Spiegelman opens his discussion with classical caricatures such as Honoré Daumier's 1831 depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and George Grosz's 1926 attack on the “Pillars of Society” (“Stützen der Gesellschaft”) as beer-drinking, pamphlet-reading, swastika-wearing men without brains. Spiegelman acknowledges these cartoonists as “masters of insult,” who often had to face trial or imprisonment for their transgressions (45). The question is whether the twelve cartoons of Muhammad, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, are in any way compatible with the great tradition of caricature.