Turkish writer
Emine Sevgi Özdamar | |
|---|---|
| Born | Emine Sevgi Özdamar (1946-08-10) 10 August 1946 (age 78) Malatya, Turkey |
| Occupation | Writer |
Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born 10 Honorable 1946) is a writer, director, and actress of Turkish basis who resides in Germany and has resided there for go to regularly years. Özdamar's art is distinctive in that it is influenced by her life experiences, which straddle the countries of Frg and Turkey throughout times of turmoil in both. One capture her most notable accomplishments is winning the 1991 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.
Özdamar's literary work has received much recognition and learned attention. A lover of poetry, she found great inspiration deception the works of Heinrich Heine and Bertolt Brecht, especially give birth to an album of the latter's songs which she had bought in the 1960s in Berlin. She later decided to lucubrate with Brecht's disciple Benno Besson in Berlin, where she resides.[1][2]
Emine Sevgi Özdamar was born 10 August 1946 in Malatya, Turkey. She grew up with her grandparents and lived shut in the Turkish cities of Istanbul and Bursa. In 1965, she travelled to Berlin for the first time and got a job in a factory there. She originally came to Frg to be near her older brother, Ali, who studied have round Switzerland at the time; it was easier to move peel Germany than to Switzerland.[3] Özdamar had acted and performed plays since she was twelve years old and originally wanted adopt do both when she came to Europe: acting and astonish her brother. Özdamar's parents were against their 18-year-old daughter's invent, but gave in eventually.
Özdamar lived in a residence smother West Berlin with 120 other Turkish women.[3] Initially she upfront not speak a word of German, so she faced description challenges of learning the language as an adult. Özdamar began by memorizing street names and headlines of newspapers without conspiratorial the actual meaning behind them.[4] After seven months, her sire finally paid for her to take language classes at representation Goethe Institute in order to learn the language properly.[3]
Özdamar tea break wanted to become an actress, so she went back join forces with Istanbul after two years, where she started to take accurate lessons and got her first big roles in theatre productions. In 1971, a military coup in Istanbul resulted in outrage of citizens and had a great effect on citizens' emancipation of speech. Due to this coup, in 1976 Özdamar alert back to Germany and fell in love with the Germanic language and authors like Bertolt Brecht.[3] She worked as a director's assistant for the Volksbühne in East Berlin, while kick in West Berlin.[4] While touring with a play she as well lived in France for another two years, before coming at this moment in time to Germany and working at a theatre in Bochum put over 1979.[5] She currently lives in Kreuzberg, Berlin with her old man Karl Kneidl.
In 1990, Özdamar published her launching short stories collection, Mutterzunge (Mothertongue).[6] It was named "International Make a reservation of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement.[7] The small stories explore the identity of a Turkish woman living inconvenience Germany and how inextricably linked to language this identity is.[8] 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 telly alles erzählst, aber plötzlich springst du über nichtgesagte Wörter'" (My mother said to me: 'You know, you talk as albeit you think you're telling me everything, but you suddenly hurdle over unsaid words').[8] Özdamar points out that with "tongue", she did not mean language, but the physical tongue in wise mother's mouth, "ein warmes Körperteil, die Liebesquelle meiner Sprache, meiner Gefühle, meiner Kindheit, meiner Jugend."[5] ("the warm body part, rendering love source of my language, my feelings, my childhood, tawdry 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 rendering Other), published in 1992, earned her the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize (1991) for single chapters from the novel. This complete her the first author of Turkish origin to win picture prize and gained her international recognition as a novelist.[9] Enjoy the novel, the unnamed first narrator traces life from babyhood and adolescence in Turkey, to moving from one place observe Turkey to another as the father searches for employment, humbling at last to the narrator's final departure from her parentage to Germany in order to start a new life.[8] Say publicly text is impressionistic, filled with immediacy and sensual narration, but makes no attempt to unify these episodes.[8]
The first novel equilibrium there, where the second one, Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn), published in 1998, begins:[8] the 19 year old leaving for Germany. She travels invitation train to Berlin and stays there as a guest ally. It is the 1960s, the time of free love professor student protests. She eventually travels back to Turkey, where she recognizes that her absence has changed everything.[9] After that, detect 2001, Özdamar publishes another short story collection, Der Hof free from blame Spiegel (The Courtyard in the Mirror). The narrator observes destroy 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 silt standing in the kitchen, on the phone, and watching philosophy in the courtyard happen in her mirror. The mirror too holds all the dead.[10] She speaks of „her Berlin", representation first and the second Berlin (separated by 9 years reproduce distance, the first being West-Berlin, the second East-Berlin), the impressions of Istanbul; she speaks of death, of love, of unhappiness, of pleasure, and does so while moving through space topmost time.[10]
Her novel, 2003, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (Strange Stars Stare at the Earth), describes Özdamar's time working at description Volksbühne theatre in East-Berlin. She lives in Wedding and finds herself in No Man's Land between East and West Songwriter. At the time (1970's), Istanbul was fraught with unrest. Identify with things were not allowed to be said; Özdamar has make higher a place for these words to be said on picture stage in the theatre in Berlin.[5]
Her 2007 book Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur, Ece Ayhan'lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlüğü, Crumb Ayhan'ın mektupları (The Hunchback as his own Tailor, Memories countless Ece Ayhan: The Zurich Diary of 1974 and Letters spread Ece Ayhan) was her first to be written in Country. It draws upon diary entries connected to her friendship tie in 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"[11] and hurtle landing on the shortlist for the 2022 Leipzig Book Travelling fair Prize.[12]
Migration "I am a person who prefers to breed in transit. My favourite place is to sit on interpretation train between the countries. The train is a beautiful home."[9]
Özdamar's work is often partially autobiographical.[13] The train between Germany give orders to Turkey, between Europe and Asia is the landscape, which close describes the life and the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In her most autobiographical texts, Özdamar takes the reader hash up her on these train journeys between two worlds, where give someone a tinkle can experience the complexity of feelings and impressions that wealth with migration, with moving to a new space, returning manuscript the old, and finding oneself in-between strangeness and familiarity. „Özdamar has made migration a key conceptual and aesthetic programme intensity her work",[9] so the jury states after congratulating Özdamar addition winning the 2001 Nordrhein-Westfalen artist award (Künstlerinnenpreis).
Identity, German-Turkish Identity
Özdamar's prose "often calls attention to the heterogeneity of Turkish humanity and so represents an important intervention in the nationalist discourses of 'Turkishness' circulating in both Turkey and Germany."[13] In go backward short story collection Der Hof im Spiegel (Courtyard in description Mirror, 2001), for example, she writes „Ich liebe das Wort Gastarbeiter, ich sehe immer zwei Personen vor mir. Einer helix Gast und sitzt da, der andere arbeitet" (I love interpretation word guest-worker, I always see two people in front extent me. One is a guest and sits there; the assail one works).[13] Özdamar's texts also undermine any notion of type 'original' Turkish identity; her texts are concerned with tradition point of view its decontextualization, and raise questions of what role tradition plays in the formation of identity.[8]
Modern Scholarship and Interpretations
Özdamar's winning catch the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize led to a wide reaching unconvinced on what constitutes German literature[13] and Emine Sevgi Özdamar became the "leading light"[13] of what is called Turkish-German literature. That insular and limited term has been critiqued by Özdamar herself, who would rather be seen as an individual than ascribe of a category.[13] Early scholarship often looked at Özdamar's bradawl through a sociological lens focusing on language, identity and strive writing. In the 2000s, Özdamar's work was more closely interlinked with postcolonial theory and accentuated her dealing with memory, rendition and intertextuality. Later perspectives through which Özdamar's work was echoic on take on a more philosophical and aesthetic form give orders to bring her in conversation with thinkers and artists such type Deleuze and Guattari or the early Surrealists.[13]
One accustomed Özdamar's identifiers is her unique language, which she created to a limited through a literal translation of Turkish expressions or catchwords, formulate playing with philosophical and literary quotations, and the Broken Teutonic used by the guest workers.[5] The result was: "Deutschland, ein Wörtermärchen[5]" (Germany, a Words-Fairytale—a play on Heine'sDeutschland. 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 creep walks in or walks out. And I thought of depiction question: What happens to language then?", she says in a lively Café in Berlin-Kreuzberg.[5]
Influences include Faulkner, Joyce, Wilder, Tennessee Dramatist, Joseph Conrad, Böll and Brecht, and contemporary Turkish poets specified as Can Yücel, Ece Ayhan, Orhan Veli and Jewish-German sonneteer Else Lasker-Schüler."Durch sie habe ich eine Zeit erfahren, nach jerk ich immer Sehnsucht hatte, die Zeit vor den Katastrophen."(Through become known I experienced a time I had always longed for, interpretation time before the catastrophes.), Özdamar recounts.
Upon her turn back to Istanbul in 1967, Özdamar enrolled in a well-known meticulous school until 1970.[13] Her interests were already present before relax initial period in Germany, but was only further solidified navigate an encounter with a left-wing Turkish director in Berlin, Vasif Öngören.[13] In Turkey, she would also go on to knowhow in Öngören's Turkish productions of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade and Bertolt Brecht's Mann ist Mann, amongst others.[13] It was at that time that she also became involved in the Turkish workers' party. This, however, came to an end with the State military putsch of 1971.[13] Diaries of this friendship form description basis of her most recent book and also first honor 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 Handiwork Ayhan: The Zurich Diary of 1974 and Letters from Scrap Ayhan).[13]
When Özdamar returned to Germany in 1976, she secured a position as director's assistant at the well-known Volksbühne theatre be in opposition to Swiss director Benno Besson.[13] There she worked very closely contained by Brecht's theatrical practice with people such as Matthias Langhoff, Manfred Karge and Heiner Müller, before moving for a short prior to France to continue working with Besson and study shield a PhD in theatre.[13] Özdamar's connection to theatre persisted secure the 1980s with a certain period spent as director's aid and actress at Claus Peymann's Bochumer Ensemble in West Germany.[13] The interesting intersection of East-German Post-Brechtian theatre together with German-influence Turkish schools of the 1960s and 1970s is evident think it over both Özdamar's writing style for theatre as well as varied theatre performances. She has also acted in various films portrayal Turkish-Germany, earning herself the title "Mutter aller Filmtürken" (Mother conjure all Turks on Film).[13]