3 - Staged Pasts: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Dramatic Aesthetic

Summary

TURKISH-GERMAN ACTRESS, dramatist, and novelist Emine Sevgi Özdamar has repeatedly cited the following sentence as her first words in German: “Mr. Besson, I have come in order to learn Brechtian theater from you.” Before fulfilling her dream in 1976, she came as guest worker in 1965 and had worked for two years in a factory in West Berlin. In her acceptance speech of the prestigious Kleist Prize in 2004—which she received at Brecht's former theater, the Berliner Ensemble—Özdamar looked back to the mid-1960s as the time she had “got to know Brecht, Lotte Lenya, Ernst Busch, and Kafka,” when “[a] Turkish dramatist, a leftist Brechtian, took [her] to the Berliner Ensemble.” She did not reflect on her first two years in West Germany in terms of her economic experience in the factory, but rather as the time during which she learned German and first encountered German literature via the theater. The Turkish dramatist she mentioned is none other than Vasıf Öngören, who, beyond his crucial role within the development of Turkish political theater discussed in the previous chapters, was equally important in Özdamar's formative years in theater. In 1967 Özdamar returned to Turkey in order to attend drama school, spending three years at the well-known LCC in Istanbul. Beklan Algan, director of the 1964 Szechwan production discussed in the first chapter, as well as prominent director Muhsin Ertuğrul and dramatist Haldun Taner, were among her teachers there. Until her emigration from Turkey in 1976 Özdamar had performed regularly in stage productions by prominent directors, including Sermet Çagan and above all Öngören. The second and third installments of her Istanbul-Berlin trilogy Sonne auf halbem Weg: Die Istanbul-Berlin Trilogie (Sun Halfway: The Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, 2006), provide an auto-fictional account of Özdamar's engagement with Brechtian theater in both divided Germany and Turkey. The second part, Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 1998), recounts her engagement with Brecht when she was back in Turkey, including her time in drama school and her encounter with Turkish Brechtian directors and dramatists, particularly Öngören, first in West Berlin and later in Ankara and Istanbul as a member of his ensemble, the Birlik Sahnesi.