Roland Barthes is one of the first names that come to mind when it comes to semiotics and has contributed to the fields of structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism and cultural studies with his works. Barthes, who also touches upon the issues of work and text among his works, states that the work is symbolic and that what is symbolic is the multiplicity of meaning. According to Barthes, the text is an act that is reconstituted in every reading. 

Objects are signs and carry meaning. The meaning that the subject attributes to the object can be social and cultural. But at the same time, the subject’s experiences and memory also play a major role in the meaning he/she gives to objects. In this way, objects can form the basis for a deeper meaning. In this context, Barthes states that in order for objects to be fully understood, an endeavour and effort should be made to find out what the connotative indicators of objects might be, and for this purpose, he puts forward two concepts under the name of signification: denotation und connotation. While denotation consists of the signifier, connotation is connected with the subjective meanings and interpretations of the signifier. 

Jan Assmann deals with objects in the context of memory. He talks about the memory of things, emphasising that it shouldn’t be ignored that the subject exists with the objects and things that surround it. Because the subject is in the sings that give information about the present and past of the subject, from daily utensils to roads and vehicles, and all of these can be referred to as the memory of the objects.

Linguist Roland Barthes doesn’t define a text as an object or structure with the same meaning. According to Barthes, a text is an act of structuring and rewriting that is reconstituted in every reading. In addition, Barthes focuses on meaning in his semiotic theory and argues that even if objects or behaviors contain meaning, meaning isn’t fully realized unless it is confirmed by a linguistic message and it is necessary to keep open the conceptualization of semiotics as the field of literature or as a different object field, because the literature has its own universe of meaning consisting of signs and can’t be isolated from semiotics in this respect. Especially considering that the signifiers of literary texts can contain multiple meanings, it should be known that every text needs a second process and that this process is interpretation, since the interpretation obtained through a sign is actually located in the field of meanings that allows us to re-explain signs with other signs, and thus meanings can be reproduced.

Born in 1968 in Istanbul, Serdar Somuncu migrated to Germany with his family at the age of two and is a well-known author and Turkish-German cabaret performer. He also speaks about Le Pen, Beate Zschäpe and Thilo Sarrazin and includes them in his works. In his "Getrennte Rechnungen" the author presents his own inner journeys and life experiences. While he was experiencing the values of both cultures as the child of an immigrant family in Germany, it is understood that he distanced himself from the meaning of the objects by attributing special meanings to the objects around him. The author, who attributes special meaning to the objects around him based on what he experiences in his inner world, allows the objects in the text to be analyzed in the context of the connotative meaning. In this context, the aim of the study is to analyze the author’s work "Getrennte Rechnungen" in the context of connotation with reference to Roland Barthes.