Emine Sevgi Özdamar
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Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born 10 August 1946) is a writer, director, and actress of Turkish origin who has lived and worked in Germany since 1976. Özdamar's art is distinctive in that it is influenced by her life experiences, which straddle the countries of Germany and Turkey throughout times of turmoil in both. One of her most notable accomplishments is winning the 1991 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Özdamar's literary work has received much recognition and scholarly attention. A lover of poetry, she found great inspiration in the works of
Heinrich Heine Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (; ; born Harry Heine; 13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was an outstanding poet, writer, and literary criticism, literary critic of 19th-century German Romanticism. He is best known outside Germany for his ...
and
Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a p ...
, especially from an album of the latter's songs which she had bought in the 1960s in
Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
. She later decided to study with Brecht's disciple
Benno Besson Benno Besson was a Swiss Theatre Director. Benno Besson (born René-Benjamin Besson; 4 November 1922 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland – 23 February 2006 in Berlin, Germany) was a theatre director A theatre director or stage director is a ...
in Berlin, where she resides.


Personal life

Emine Sevgi Özdamar was born 10 August 1946 in
Malatya Malatya (; ; Syriac language, Syriac ܡܠܝܛܝܢܐ Malīṭīná; ; Ancient Greek: Μελιτηνή) is a city in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey and the capital of Malatya Province. The city has been a human settlement for thousands of y ...
, Turkey. She grew up with her grandparents and lived in the Turkish cities of
Istanbul Istanbul is the List of largest cities and towns in Turkey, largest city in Turkey, constituting the country's economic, cultural, and historical heart. With Demographics of Istanbul, a population over , it is home to 18% of the Demographics ...
and
Bursa Bursa () is a city in northwestern Turkey and the administrative center of Bursa Province. The fourth-most populous city in Turkey and second-most populous in the Marmara Region, Bursa is one of the industrial centers of the country. Most of ...
. In 1965, she travelled to
Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
for the first time and got a job in a factory there. She originally came to Germany to be near her older brother, Ali, who studied in Switzerland at the time; it was easier to move to Germany than to Switzerland. Özdamar had acted and performed plays since she was twelve years old and originally wanted to do both when she came to Europe: acting and seeing her brother. Özdamar's parents were against their 18-year-old daughter's plan, but gave in eventually. Özdamar lived in a residence in
West Berlin West Berlin ( or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin from 1948 until 1990, during the Cold War. Although West Berlin lacked any sovereignty and was under military occupation until German reunification in 1 ...
with 120 other Turkish women. Initially she did not speak a word of German, so she faced the challenges of learning the language as an adult. Özdamar began by memorizing street names and headlines of newspapers without knowing the actual meaning behind them. After seven months, her father finally paid for her to take language classes at the
Goethe Institute The Goethe-Institut (; GI, ''Goethe Institute'') is a Nonprofit organization, nonprofit German culture, cultural organization operational worldwide with more than 150 cultural centres, promoting the study of the German language abroad and en ...
in order to learn the language properly. Özdamar still wanted to become an actress, so she went back to Istanbul after two years, where she started to take acting lessons and got her first big roles in theatre productions. In 1971, a military coup in Istanbul resulted in persecution of citizens and had a great effect on citizens' freedom of speech. Due to this coup, in 1976 Özdamar moved back to Germany and fell in love with the German language and authors like Bertolt Brecht. She worked as a director's assistant for the Volksbühne in
East Berlin East Berlin (; ) was the partially recognised capital city, capital of East Germany (GDR) from 1949 to 1990. From 1945, it was the Allied occupation zones in Germany, Soviet occupation sector of Berlin. The American, British, and French se ...
, while living in West Berlin. While touring with a play she also lived in France for another two years, before coming back to Germany and working at a theatre in Bochum in 1979. She currently lives in Kreuzberg, Berlin with her husband Karl Kneidl.


Literary career


Major works

In 1990, Özdamar published her debut short stories collection, ''Mutterzunge'' (''Mothertongue''). It was named "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement. The short stories explore the identity of a Turkish woman living in Germany and how inextricably linked to language this identity is. The narrator has lost her mother tongue, Turkish, and speaks fluent, but flawed, German. The narrator remembers an occasion when she and her mother were speaking Turkish, "Meine Mutter sagte mir: 'Weißt du, du sprichst so, du denkst, daß du alles erzählst, aber plötzlich springst du über nichtgesagte Wörter'" (My mother said to me: 'You know, you talk as though you think you're telling me everything, but you suddenly jump over unsaid words'). Özdamar points out that with "tongue", she did not mean language, but the physical tongue in her mother's mouth, "ein warmes Körperteil, die Liebesquelle meiner Sprache, meiner Gefühle, meiner Kindheit, meiner Jugend." ("the warm body part, the love source of my language, my feelings, my childhood, my adolescence.") Emine Sevgi Özdamar's first novel, ''Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus'' (''Life is a Caravanserai : Has Two Doors I Went in One I Came out the Other''), published in 1992, earned her the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize (1991) for single chapters from the novel. This made her the first author of Turkish origin to win the prize and gained her international recognition as a novelist. In the novel, the unnamed first narrator traces life from childhood and adolescence in Turkey, to moving from one place in Turkey to another as the father searches for employment, and at last to the narrator's final departure from her family to Germany in order to start a new life. The text is impressionistic, filled with immediacy and sensual narration, but makes no attempt to unify these episodes. The first novel ends there, where the second one, ''Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn'' (''The Bridge of the Golden Horn''), published in 1998, begins: the 19 year old leaving for Germany. She travels by train to Berlin and stays there as a guest worker. It is the 1960s, the time of free love and student protests. She eventually travels back to Turkey, where she recognizes that her absence has changed everything. After that, in 2001, Özdamar publishes another short story collection, ''Der Hof im Spiegel'' (''The Courtyard in the Mirror''). The narrator observes through the window of her apartment. There are cities: Berlin, Amsterdam, Istanbul. Or a theatre. A train full of guest workers. The living room of an old man. The narrator is standing in the kitchen, on the phone, and watching life in the courtyard happen in her mirror. The mirror also holds all the dead. She speaks of „her Berlin", the first and the second Berlin (separated by 9 years of distance, the first being West-Berlin, the second East-Berlin), the impressions of Istanbul; she speaks of death, of love, of sorrow, of pleasure, and does so while moving through space and time. Her novel, 2003, ''Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde'' (''Strange Stars Stare at the Earth''), describes Özdamar's time working at the Volksbühne theatre in East-Berlin. She lives in Wedding and finds herself in No Man's Land between East and West Berlin. At the time (1970's), Istanbul was fraught with unrest. Certain things were not allowed to be said; Özdamar has found a place for these words to be said on the stage in the theatre in Berlin. Her 2007 book ''Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur, Ece Ayhan'lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlüğü, Ece Ayhan'ın mektupları'' (''The Hunchback as his own Tailor, Memories of Ece Ayhan: The Zurich Diary of 1974 and Letters from Ece Ayhan'') was her first to be written in Turkish. It draws upon diary entries connected to her friendship with director Vasif Öngören. In 2021, Özdamar published the novel ''Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum'' to much critical acclaim, with RBB Kultur reporter Katharina Döbler describing it as "magnificent" and it landing on the shortlist for the 2022 Leipzig Book Fair Prize.


Major themes

Migration "I am a person who prefers to be in transit. My favourite place is to sit on the train between the countries. The train is a beautiful home." Özdamar's work is often partially autobiographical. The train between Germany and Turkey, between Europe and Asia is the landscape, which closely describes the life and the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In her most autobiographical texts, Özdamar takes the reader with her on these train journeys between two worlds, where one can experience the complexity of feelings and impressions that come with migration, with moving to a new space, returning to the old, and finding oneself in-between strangeness and familiarity. „Özdamar has made migration a key conceptual and aesthetic programme in her work", so the jury states after congratulating Özdamar on winning the 2001 Nordrhein-Westfalen artist award (''Künstlerinnenpreis''). Identity, German-Turkish Identity Özdamar's prose "often calls attention to the heterogeneity of Turkish culture and so represents an important intervention in the nationalist discourses of 'Turkishness' circulating in both Turkey and Germany." In her short story collection ''Der Hof im Spiegel'' (''Courtyard in the Mirror'', 2001), for example, she writes „Ich liebe das Wort Gastarbeiter, ich sehe immer zwei Personen vor mir. Einer ist Gast und sitzt da, der andere arbeitet" (I love the word guest-worker, I always see two people in front of me. One is a guest and sits there; the other one works). Özdamar's texts also undermine any notion of an 'original' Turkish identity; her texts are concerned with tradition and its decontextualization, and raise questions of what role tradition plays in the formation of identity. Modern Scholarship and Interpretations Özdamar's winning of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize led to a wide reaching discussion on what constitutes German literature and Emine Sevgi Özdamar became the "leading light" of what is called
Turkish-German Turks in Germany, also referred to as German Turks and Turkish Germans ( or ''Deutschtürken''; , also known as ''Gurbetçiler'' or ''Almancılar''), are ethnic Turkish people living in Germany. These terms are also used to refer to German-born ...
literature. This insular and limited term has been critiqued by Özdamar herself, who would rather be seen as an individual than part of a category. Early scholarship often looked at Özdamar's work through a sociological lens focusing on language, identity and life writing. In the 2000s, Özdamar's work was more closely interlinked with postcolonial theory and accentuated her dealing with memory, translation and intertextuality. Later perspectives through which Özdamar's work was reflected on take on a more philosophical and aesthetic form and bring her in conversation with thinkers and artists such as
Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes o ...
and Guattari or the early
Surrealists Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and id ...
.


Style and influences

One of Özdamar's identifiers is her unique language, which she created partially through a literal translation of Turkish expressions or catchwords, through playing with philosophical and literary quotations, and the Broken German used by the guest workers. The result was: "Deutschland, ein Wörtermärchen" (Germany, a Words-Fairytale—a play on Heine's Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen). "Damals kam ich auf die Idee von Deutschland als Tür, durch die man hinein- oder hinausgeht. Und auf die Frage: Was passiert dabei mit der Sprache?" (Back then, an idea came to me of Germany as a door, through which one walks in or walks out. And I thought of the question: What happens to language then?", she says in a lively Café in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Influences include
Faulkner William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he s ...
, Joyce, Wilder, Tennessee Williams,
Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Poles in the United Kingdom#19th century, Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the Eng ...
, Böll and Brecht, and contemporary Turkish poets such as
Can Yücel Can Yücel (; August 21, 1926 – August 12, 1999) was a Turkish poet noted for his use of colloquial language. Biography Can Yücel was the son of a former Minister of National Education, Hasan Âli Yücel, who left his mark on the history of ...
, Ece Ayhan, Orhan Veli and Jewish-German poet
Else Lasker-Schüler Else Lasker-Schüler (née Elisabeth Schüler) (; 11 February 1869 – 22 January 1945) was a German poet and playwright famous for her bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and her poetry. She was one of the few women affiliated with the Expressionist ...
."Durch sie habe ich eine Zeit erfahren, nach der ich immer Sehnsucht hatte, die Zeit vor den Katastrophen."(Through her I experienced a time I had always longed for, the time before the catastrophes.), Özdamar recounts.


Acting/Directing Career

Upon her return to Istanbul in 1967, Özdamar enrolled in a well-known acting school until 1970. Her interests were already present before her initial period in Germany, but was only further solidified through an encounter with a left-wing Turkish director in Berlin, Vasif Öngören. In Turkey, she would also go on to star in Öngören's Turkish productions of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade and Bertolt Brecht's Mann ist Mann, amongst others. It was at this time that she also became involved in the Turkish workers' party. This, however, came to an end with the Turkish military putsch of 1971. Diaries of this friendship form the basis of her most recent book and also first of her prose to be written in Turkish, ''Kendi Kendinim Terzisi Bir Kambur, Ece Ayhan'lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlüğü, Ece Ayhan'ın makrupları'' (''The Hunchback as his own Tailor, Memories of Ece Ayhan: The Zurich Diary of 1974 and Letters from Ece Ayhan''). When Özdamar returned to Germany in 1976, she secured a position as director's assistant at the well-known Volksbühne theatre to Swiss director
Benno Besson Benno Besson was a Swiss Theatre Director. Benno Besson (born René-Benjamin Besson; 4 November 1922 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland – 23 February 2006 in Berlin, Germany) was a theatre director A theatre director or stage director is a ...
. There she worked very closely within Brecht's theatrical practice with people such as Matthias Langhoff, Manfred Karge and Heiner Müller, before moving for a short time to France to continue working with Besson and study for a PhD in theatre. Özdamar's connection to theatre persisted into the 1980s with a certain period spent as director's assistant and actress at Claus Peymann's Bochumer Ensemble in West Germany. The interesting intersection of East-German Post-Brechtian theatre together with German-influence Turkish schools of the 1960s and 1970s is evident in both Özdamar's writing style for theatre as well as diverse theatre performances. She has also acted in various films depicting Turkish-Germany, earning herself the title "Mutter aller Filmtürken" (Mother of all Turks on Film).


Awards

* Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (1991) * (1993) * New-York Scholarship of the Literaturfonds Darmstadt (1995) * Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preis (1999) * (2001) *
Stadtschreiber von Bergen The Stadtschreiber von Bergen ('City clerk of Bergen') is an annual German literary award. The prize money is €20,000 with one year of free living in the town clerk's house in Bergen-Enkheim, Frankfurt, "An der Oberpforte 4". It was the first S ...
(2003) *
Kleist Prize The Kleist Prize is an annual German literature prize. The prize was first awarded in 1912, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist. The Kleist Prize was the most important literary award of the Weimar Rep ...
(2004) * Kunstpreis Berlin (Fontane Prize) (2009) * Carl Zuckmayer Medal (2010) * (2012) *
Roswitha Prize The Roswitha Prize () is the oldest German language prize for literature that is given solely to women. The Roswitha-Medal has been given almost yearly since 1973 by the city of Bad Gandersheim. In 1998 it received its modern designation along wi ...
(2021) * Bayerischer Buchpreis (2021) * Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis (2022) *
Georg Büchner Prize The Georg Büchner Prize () is the most important literary prize for German language literature. The award is named after dramatist and writer Georg Büchner, author of '' Woyzeck'' and '' Leonce and Lena''. The Georg Büchner Prize is awarded an ...
(2022) *
Schiller Prize of the City of Mannheim The Schiller Prize of the City of Mannheim has been awarded by the City of Mannheim since 1954. It was donated on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the National Theatre. The prize is awarded every two years and endowed with €20,000. It i ...
(2022)


Works

* '' Karagöz in Alamania'', (play, 1982) * ''Mutterzunge'', (short stories, 1990, ) The issue Maman/Mutter 2018 of the literary review la mer gelée published a version of the story Mutterzunge (in German, together with a French translation), slightly corrected by the author. * ''Keleoğlan in Alamania'', (play, 1991) * ''Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus'', (novel, 1992, ) engl. "Life is a Caravanserai Has Two Doors I Went in One I Came out the Other" tr. Luise von Flotow UMiddlesex Press 2000. * ''Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn'', (novel, 1998, ), engl. ''The Bridge of the Golden Horn'', publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2009, * ''Der Hof im Spiegel'', (short stories, 2001, ) * ''Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde'', (novel, 2003, ) * ''Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur, Ece Ayhan'lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlüğü, Ece Ayhan'ın makrupları.'' (2007, ISBN 978-975-08-1305-4) * ''Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum'', (novel, 2021, Suhrkamp )


References


Further reading

* * Arslan, Gizem. "Animated Exchange: Translational Strategies in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's ''Strange Stars Stare to Earth''." ''Global South'' (2013): 191–209. Print. * * * * * Pizer, John. "The Continuation of Countermemory: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Seltsame Sterne Starren Zur Erde." ''German Literature in a New Century: Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations.'' Ed. Katharina Gerstenberger and Patricia Herminghouse. ix, 300 pp. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2008. 135–152. Print. * Shafi, Monika. Housebound : Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Print. *


External links

*
Emine Sevgi Özdamar
in:
NRW Literatur im Netz NRW Literatur im Netz is a German internet database with short biographies of persons who have lived or worked in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Westphälische Literaturbüro (Westphalian office for literature) in Unna operates the biggest database ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ozdamar, Emine Sevgi 1946 births German people of Turkish descent German women dramatists and playwrights 20th-century German dramatists and playwrights 21st-century German dramatists and playwrights 20th-century German novelists 21st-century German novelists Living people Kleist Prize winners Ingeborg Bachmann Prize winners German women novelists Turkish women writers Turkish dramatists and playwrights Turkish women dramatists and playwrights 21st-century German women writers 20th-century German women writers