German-Turkish Writer Wins Kleist Award

The Berlin-based German-Turkish writer and actor Emine Sevgi Özdamar recently won the Kleist Award. In the past the prize has been awarded to such illustrious names as Berthold Brecht, Heiner Müller, and Robert Musil. By Lennart Lehmann

The thing that makes Emine Sevgi Özdamar so fascinating is the fact that she is so consistently inconsistent. It's as if she allows herself to be swept from a path she has chosen to follow only to dedicate herself to something else with great intensity and always with great success.

Özdamar arrived in West Berlin as a guest worker in the 1960s, she then returned to Istanbul to train as an actor, and is now a writer in Germany. In the 1970s this talented international commuter lived in West Berlin and worked in East Berlin.

Too clever to pin herself down

What's more, even though she was born and raised in Turkey, she writes in German; a language she only learned as an adult and cannot speak perfectly to this day. Maybe Özdamar is too clever to pin herself down.

Özdamar was born in 1946. Even as a child she was fascinated by stories and poetry, and read novels like Madame Bovary and Robinson Crusoe to her illiterate grandmother.

"While I was reading Robinson Crusoe, grandmother would keep asking questions: How did the family bear it? What did his wife do? What did his children eat? She couldn't stop thinking about Robinson Crusoe's family and was really worried about them. So I reassured her and made up things that the children could have eaten: rice with lamb and corn and chestnuts."

Karagöz in Alemania

She started writing professionally after receiving a letter during a stint at the Bochumer Theater in western Germany. "The letter touched me because the author was a loser. I wanted to write a play to show him that his life was a novel. I wanted to make him happy."

The result was the play Karagöz in Alemania, the story of a farmer and his talking donkey and their amazing journey to Germany. She hasn't stopped writing plays, stories, and novels since. She has also been inundated with awards.

The devotion with which she learns the German language is astonishing. Even though she doesn't like to express opinions on political events, politics played a key role in her decision as to what language to work in.

Spirit of freedom in Germany

In 1971, a putsch in Turkey returned the military to power for the second time. The putsch was followed by mass imprisonments and censure. In her acceptance speech, Özdamar relates how, in sharp contrast to Turkey, she still felt the spirit of freedom in Germany when she moved there as a 30 year-old in 1976 to act at the Ostberliner Volksbühne.

"With a putsch, everything stands still. The building sites, the exports, the imports, human rights … even careers stand still. Love can also stand still. A big hole opens up. It is said that you lose your mother tongue in a foreign country. But in years like those, you can even lose your mother tongue in your native country; the words get stuck; you become afraid of them. Back then, I grew weary in my mother tongue."

"When night falls over a country," Özdamar continues, "even the stones seek a new language. There in Istanbul, in that deep hole, the words of Brecht helped me: Thank God everything passes quickly; even love and sadness. The tongue has no bones. I turned it into German and suddenly I was happy."

What is the secret of her success? The Turkish tradition of telling stories, full of humour and tragedy, connects her to the European form of literature.

Inspired by a poetic childhood

"I had the feeling that my childhood was very poetic. We were surrounded by people, cats, a completely different rhythm: slower, peaceful … I longed for that time. And I thought to myself: I have to recall these wonderful people, these fantastic women that marched through the streets with drums, I have to recall these people who have died, I have to find them again and give them to other people. That was my great need."

Life Is a Caravanserai, Has two doors, I Came in One, I Went out the Other is the title of one of her best-known stories. The title explains the book's themes: the continuous change, the crossing of borders, the constant confrontation with new situations.

Continuous quest for identity

Individuals have to make sure of their identity again and again, and cast a melancholy glance to the past: where are the dead people who shaped me, and where is the knowledge they imparted?

"Sometimes when I am sitting in a plane in the sky, I think of all the words buried in the ground that the dead, the people I loved, took with them. I long for their words."

In 1991, Özdamar won the Ingeborg Bachmann Award for Life Is a Caravanserai, Has two doors, I Came in One, I Went out the Other; in 1993 the Walter Hasenclever Award; in 1995 the New York scholarship from the Deutscher Literaturfonds (German Literary Fund); and in 1994 the London Times Literary Supplement "International Book of the Year".

Her second novel, The Bridge of the Golden Horn, was published in 1998 and earned her the Adelbert von Chamisso Award and the LiteraTour Nord Award in 1999.

Her third novel, Strange Stars Turn to Earth, in which she describes her life in Berlin, was published last year.

Lennart Lehmann

© Qantara.de 2004

Translation from German: Aingeal Flanagan