Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born 10 August 1946) is a writer, director, and actress of Turkish origin who resides in Germany and has resided there for many years. 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 and Bertolt Brecht, especially from an album of the latter's songs which she had bought in the 1960s in Berlin. She later decided to study with Brecht's disciple Benno Besson in Berlin, where she resides.
Personal life
Emine Sevgi Özdamar was born 10 August 1946 in Malatya, Turkey. She grew up with her grandparents and lived 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 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 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 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, 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.