Women writers in German in the post-1945 period

Dr Georgina Paul,

Emine Sevgi Özdamar: the ‘nomadic polyglot’ (Rosi Braidotti)

Emine Sevgi Özdamar b. 10.8.1946 in Malatya, Anatolia, Turkey. Actress, director, novelist. First came to Germany in 1965 as a Turkish Gastarbeiterin: worked in a factory in Berlin. Returned to Istanbul in 1967 and trained as an actress, working on the Istanbul stage from 1970. Political suppression of left-wingers (friends of ESO’s were arrested and persecuted) led her to return to Germany in 1976, where she gained work at the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in East Berlin under directors Benno Besson and Matthias Langhoff. From 1979 to 1984 she was employed as an actress in the Bochum Schauspielhaus under the management of Claus Peymann. This theatre commissioned her first play Karagöz in Alemania which was then directed by her personally.

Selected works
Karagöz in Alemania (‘Schwarzauge in Deutschland’,drama, 1982)
Mutterzunge (Erzählungen, 1990 – incl. a prose version of Karagöz in Alemania)
Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai - hat zwei Türen – aus einer kam ich rein – aus der anderen ging ich raus (novel, 1992)
Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (novel, 1998)
Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (novel, 2003)
Der Hof im Spiegel (Erzählungen, 2001 – inc. a hilarious account of putting on the play Karagöz in Alemania)

1. ‘Feminism as a critical philosophy rests on the assumption that what we used to call “the universal subject of knowledge” is a falsely generalized standpoint. The discourses of science, religion, the law, as well as the general assumptions that govern the production of knowledge, tacitly imply a subject that is male (and also white, middle-class, and heterosexual). If, in a nomadic movement of strategic mimesis, such as Irigaray suggests, this subject is replaced with one that is structured by other variables, such as gender or sexual difference but also ethnicity or race, what used to appear as “the universal” appears as a most particular and specific approach. This particularity also explains its power of exclusion over categories of people who are deemed “minorities,” or “others.” What I want to argue, therefore, is that the decline of the universal in the age of modernity marks the opportunity for the definition of a nomadic standpoint that is based on differences while not being merely relativistic. […] These new [feminist] theorists rest accordingly on a vision of the subject as process; they work along the lines of a multiplicity of variables of definition of female subjectivity: race, class, age, sexual preference, and lifestyles count as major axes of identity. They are radically materialistic in that they stress the concrete, “situated” conditions that structure subjectivity, but they also innovate on the classical notion of materialism, because they redefine female subjectivity in terms of a process network of simultaneous power formations.’ Rosi Braidotti, ‘Re-figuring the Subject’, in Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp.98-9 (NB this chapter is not included in the 2011 re-edition)

2. ‘The nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; it is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity.’ […] ‘Being a nomad, living in transition, does not mean that one cannot or is unwilling to create those necessarily stable and reassuring bases for identity that allow one to function in a community. Rather, nomadic consciousness consists in not taking any kind of identity as permanent. The nomad is only passing through; s/he makes those necessarily situated connections that can help her/him to survive, but s/he never takes on fully the limits of one national, fixed identity.’ Braidotti, ‘Introduction’, pp. 22, 33.

3. ‘Taken together, the [urban, community] street and the [open] road [as the typical alternating scenes of Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei] suggest a flexible ideal of identity: they evoke a communal base of selfhood, but also the capacity to deal with change and not to be submerged in communalism.’ Elizabeth Boa, ‘Özdamar’s Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity and Literary Form’, German Life and Letters Vol. LIX No. 4 (October 2006), pp.526-39 (here p.531).

4. ‘The bridge over the Golden Horn links the ancient heart of European Istanbul, once a centre of Christendom, with newer European districts. The title thus evokes European heterogeneity at the heart of a city which is now a city of Islamic culture. […] Cultures do not provide monolithic, static pillars to support bridges, but are always changing under the pressures of generational, regional, ethnic, religious or political tensions and economic or class differences. In another city, it too divided between East and West, the heroine learns the cosmopolitan politics of Marxism, a tradition rooted in the European Enlightenment. But in this tale of two cities she learns as much from Turkish political exiles in Berlin as from German would-be revolutionaries, and the Marxism which once traveled eastwards returns westwards as Marxist-Leninist or Maoist discourse: the movement of ideas is not uni-directional.’ Boa, p.534.

5. ‘She [Özdamar] is … a nomadic intellectual who ultimately accepts her own hybridity, in place of the restoration of an intact identity.’ Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler, Contemporary Women's Writing in German: Changing the Subject, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture), 2004, p.122.

6. ‘While the conflation of sacred and profane love and the profusion of natural and elemental imagery in the text [i.e. ‘Großvaterzunge’, in Mutterzunge] can be attributed to an oral Turkish folk tradition preserving traces of Ottoman culture, there are striking similarities between Özdamar’s representation of embodied female subjectivity and a dynamic, material world and the materialist concerns of recent feminist thought. If meaning emerges at the level of the body then there can be no false universalism accorded to reason and thought, which is always already marked by sexual difference. And if human being is viewed as a mode of nature, not radically opposed to the material world, different forms of sociability may become possible, not based on the binary conceptions of self and other which dominate western cultures.’ Haines and Littler, Contemporary Women's Writing in German, p.133.

7. ‘Utterly crucial to the novel’s [Karawanserei’s] impact is the German language deployed by a narrator divided from, yet affectionately evoking, both a younger self and the Turkish language, which appears comically distanced and magically shining through the German medium. Written in German, the text transliterates Turkish idiom, mixing in also Koranic Arabic along with English and American fragments such as the names of film stars spelled phonetically, Humphrey Pockart (K 28), or Pürt Lankaster and Ava Kaertner (K 181). […] As Robert Young argues […] in post-colonial discourse “hybridity begins to become the form of cultural difference itself, the jarrings of a differentiated culture whose ‘hybrid counter-energies’, in Said’s phrase, challenge the centred cultural norms.’ Boa, p.533.

8. In Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn: ‘Linguistic mingling takes on utopian meaning, signifying a trans-national condition, which is neither an abstract universal humanity nor the preservation in aspic of cultural differences, but mutually transformative, imaginative interchange symbolized through erotic meeting.’ Boa, p.535.

Secondary reading
Theory of ‘nomadism’:
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 – read the introduction, ‘By Way of Nomadism’ and chapter 8, ‘Sexual Difference as a  Nomadic Political Project’ – which usefully extends the considerations of the earlier feminist theorists such as Irigaray

On Özdamar:
Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler, Contemporary Women's Writing in German: Changing the Subject, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture), 2004 – includes a chapter on Mutterzunge
Stephanie Bird, Women Writers and National Identity. Bachmann – Duden – Özdamar, Cambridge UP, 2003 – two chapters on Özdamar
Elizabeth Boa, ‘Sprachenverkehr: Hybrides Schreiben in Werken von Özdamar, Özakin und Demirkan’, in Mary Howard (ed.), Interkulturelle Figurationen: Zur deutschsprachigen Prosaliteratur von Autoren nichtdeutscher Herkunft, Munich: iudicium, 1997, pp.115-37
Elizabeth Boa, ‘Özdamar’s Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity and Literary Form’, German Life and Letters Vol. LIX No. 4 (October 2006), pp.526-39
Soheila Ghaussy, ‘“Das Vaterland verlassen”: Nomadic Language and “Feminine Writing” in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei’, German Quarterly 72 No. 1 (1999), pp.1-16
Margaret Littler, ‘Özdamar, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei’, in Peter Hutchinson and Michael Minden (eds), Landmarks in the German Novel (2). Oxford, England: Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 93-110
Moray McGowan, ‘Turkish-German Fiction since the Mid 1990s’, in Stuart Taberner (ed.), Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 196-214
Azade Seyhan, ‘Lost in Translation: Re-Membering the Mother Tongue in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei’, German Quarterly 69 (1996), pp.414-26
Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: UP, 2001
Angela Weber, Im Spiegel der Migrationen: Transkulturelles Erzählen und Sprachpolitik bei Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Bielefeld: transcript, 2009

General on Turks in Germany/Europe:
David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky (eds), Turkish Culture in German Society Today, Oxford: Berghahn, 1996
Kevin Robins, ‘Interrupting Identities: Turkey/Europe’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage, 1996

Leslie Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
Tom Cheesman, Novels of Turkish-German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007