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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Emine Sevgi Özdamar

In 2009, the Turkish-born, German-language writer and actress Emine Sevgi Özdamar became only the fourth woman to win Berlin’s prestigious Fontane Prize for literature, placing her in the company of such giants of German literature as Günter Grass, Wolf Biermann and Alexander Kluge.

Özdamar’s novels and short stories are often semi-autobiographical. Female protagonists bearing a striking resemblance with the author inhabit a world clearly identifiable as late 20th-century Europe; they chronicle or reflect on the political and artistic developments of the time, whether in Türkiye, Germany or the spaces around and in-between. In Özdamar’s narratives and plays, the cast of ‘guest-workers’ is supplemented by talking donkeys, opera singers, prostitutes, left-wing radicals, fairy-tale figures and the voices of the dead. The resulting sense of the absurd, grotesque or burlesque is part of the great attraction that Özdamar’s aesthetic project holds for readers and critics alike.

Özdamar’s work is written predominantly in German. However, the author was born in Türkiye, in the city of Malataya, Eastern Anatolia, in 1946; as a child, she also lived in Istanbul, the country’s capital, and Bursa, a city just to the south of the capital. In the 1960s, both Türkiye and Germany would be transformed by bilateral recruitment agreements between the two countries, which were designed to provide the growing German economy with temporary labourers or ‘guest-workers’. The demand in West Germany for female workers in the electronics industry provided an opportunity for Özdamar to move to Germany where, in 1965, she took up employment as a factory worker at Siemens in Berlin, before enrolling at the Goethe Institute to learn German. For Özdamar, as a child of the urban middle class, this experience presented a new encounter not only with German culture but also with the more rural working-class culture of many of her fellow guest-workers. As Özdamar herself explained in an interview with Andrea Dernbach und Katja Reimann (2011): ‘I travelled almost two thousand kilometres to get to know Turks’.

Özdamar’s prose, similar to the interview statement quoted above, often calls attention to the heterogeneity of Turkish culture and so represents an important intervention in the nationalist discourses of ‘Turkishness’ circulating in both Türkiye and Germany. Her writing has also provided some of the most striking images in contemporary German literature of the contradictions of ‘guest-work’ or Gastarbeit. The following oft-quoted line is taken from the short-story collection Der Hof im Spiegel (The Courtyard in the Mirror, [2001]), for example: ‘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). Here, as many critics have highlighted, Özdamar’s characteristic ‘Sprachdadaismus’ or ‘linguistic Dadaism’ playfully and vividly highlights the distance between the language of labour migration and the reality of the power relations that such language hides.

Emine_Sevgi_Özdamar_2021 (Foto Amrei-Marie WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0).jpg
Emine Sevgi Özdamar, 2021 (Photo: Amrei-Marie, WIkimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

In 1967, Özdamar returned to Istanbul, where she enrolled in a renowned acting school until 1970. Her interest in the theatre had begun prior to her initial period in Germany but was strengthened by her encounters in Berlin with a left-wing Turkish director (identified as Vasif Öngören by theatre scholar Erol Boran). Back in Türkiye, 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. During this time, she also became involved in the Turkish workers’ party; however, both her theatrical and political activities came to an abrupt end with the Turkish military putsch of 1971. Özdamar then lived for a while with the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, who gifted her the first name ‘Emine’. Diaries and letters from this friendship form the basis of Özdamar’s most recently published book, 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 [2007]), the first of her semi-autobiographical prose works to be written in Turkish.

The violent period of the Turkish military putsch is presented as extremely traumatic in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn [1998]) and the short-story collection Mutterzunge (Mother Tongues [1990]). It is often used to at least partially account for the turn to the German language in Özdamar’s writing and for the author’s return to Germany in 1976, where she would eventually settle. Back in Berlin, Özdamar secured a position as director’s assistant to Swiss director Benno Besson at the renowned Volksbühne theatre, in the eastern half of the city. There she worked closely with the East German heirs to Brecht’s theatrical practice including Matthias Langhoff, Manfred Karge and Heiner Müller, before moving briefly to France to continue working with Besson and study for a PhD in theatre. Özdamar’s connection to the German theatrical establishment would continue throughout the 1980s, with a period spent as director’s assistant and actress at Claus Peymann’s Bochumer Ensemble in West Germany. Trained both in the East German post-Brechtian ensemble system and in the German-influenced Turkish acting schools of the 1960s and 1970s, Özdamar has actively explored and created intersections between these diverse performance traditions in her writing for the theatre. She has also starred in numerous films depicting Turkish-Germany, earning herself the title of ‘Mutter aller Filmtürken’ (‘Mother of all Turks on film’: see Daniel Bax, ‘Deutschland, ein Wörtermärchen’, TAZ [20.11.2004]) in the process.

In 1991, Özdamar began to gain recognition as a novelist when an extract from her first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a Carawanserai Has Two Doors I Went in One I Came out the Other [1992]), was awarded the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for Literature. Özdamar was the first author of Turkish origin to be awarded the prize; as Karen Jankowksy (1997) has outlined, this led to a large-scale debate over the definition of German literature. More than 20 years later, Özdamar’s status as a leading light of what is often called Turkish-German literature is now well established within the academy. In 2014, she was guest lecturer both in New York and Hamburg, for example, and her work has played a central role in the work of scholars such as Leslie A. Adelson and Tom Cheesman on this emerging strand of German literature. The restrictive nature of the label of Turkish-German author has been critiqued by Özdamar herself, however, who prefers to be seen simply as a writer in her own right. Early critical engagements with her work did often focus on reading Özdamar’s work somewhat sociologically through the lens of language, identity and life writing; a major theme was the potential of her work for furthering intercultural understanding. Into the 2000s, however, more critical modes of reading were developed which brought Özdamar’s work into contact with postcolonial theory and highlighted her concerns with memory, translation and intertextuality. While interculturality remains a frequently employed framework for understanding her work, later engagements with her writing have also focused on aesthetics and more philosophical readings, bringing Özdamar’s writing into dialogue with thinkers and artists ranging from Deleuze and Guattari to the early Surrealists.

Özdamar has received numerous awards and prizes: the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis (1991); Stipendium des Deutschen Literaturfonds (1992); Walter-Hasenclever-Preis der Stadt Aachen (1993); International Book of the Year (Times Literary Supplement) (1994); New-York Scholarship des Literaturfonds Darmstadt (1995); Adalbert-von-Chamisso-Literaturpreis (1999); Künstlerinnenpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen im Bereich Literatur / Prosa (2001); Stadtschreiberin von Bergen-Enkheim (2003); Kleist-Preis (2004); Member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (2007); Fontane-Preis (Kunstpreis Berlin 2009 des Landes Berlin) (2009); Carl-Zuckmayer-Medaille (2010); Alice Salomon Poetik Preis (2012). 

Compiled by Lizzie Stewart (London)